Written by Mel Reichler Copyright 2002

Vermeers: a novel

Chapter 1

Darkness also travels at the speed of light.

Once Nick Strayte got this idea into his head he could not get it out. The only way not to think about it was to wrench his mind out of it, but the effort exhausted him and left him panting and drenched in a sour, sweaty confusion about whether he had the idea or the idea had him. Either way, it didn’t make any sense.

Bad science and flawed philosophy. Shined a light on darkness and made it disappear. Threw a shadow on light and obscured it. It made darkness and light wild and ambiguous and mysterious, the way sane was a mystery after he went crazy and the way being crazy was mysterious after he went sane again.

He banged his head with his hand trying to jar the idea out of his mind but the thought just ricocheted from one side of his skull to another and left him dizzy with a hundred tinny echoes of the notion bouncing around in his brain. When the jingling stopped, he realized he was overhearing messages from some part of the insides of him to another part inside. He decoded the transmission; ‘You are going crazy,’ it said.

He made two quick decisions. The first: if he was going crazy he would decide when and how to go — and now was as good a time as any. The second: to observe himself very carefully so that he could watch himself going crazy. Watching was a bad habit, but it had gotten him as far as he was in life and he was not ready to jettison it just because, at this particular juncture, it was senseless.

He rationalized the decisions. If crazy was not the perfect vacation from reality he could retrace his steps and worm his way home to sanity. “Sanity was home. Insanity, was a vacation from home.” After he recovered from going crazy he realized that this was the first real sign that he had already gone.

He didn’t decide to go crazy, not decide in the sense of making a decision. What he decided, in the sense of making a decision, was to learn to fly.

He had been thinking of going out all morning, ever since the call from Dean Grundle. When he answered it, Dean Grundle was screaming at him again. Dean Grundle had screamed at him ever since the faculty meeting Strayte had disrupted by taking off his clothes.

“Charges have been filed against you, Strayte. One of your students has complained that you molested her. The committee on faculty behavior has filed sexual harassment charges. You’ve had it this time, you shit. I hope you get what’s coming to you.”

“Who?” was all he could say, but, of course he knew.

The connection went dead. “Why?” he asked the dead line.

The call put the idea of going outside into his head. But it was raining, and he could not get himself to go out into the wetness until the sharp, slicing ring of the telephone chopped into his head a second time and he picked up the receiver and there was just a glossy, inanimate, plastic silence, no noise, no static.

“Marsha,” he asked the emptiness. “Marsha?” There was nothing but a whisper of air being imprisoned and paroled on the other end of the phone. He knew who was on the line, but Marsha refused to speak. He held onto the receiver a long time before the party making the silence hung up. Then he decided it was time to go out, into the rain, and learn to fly.

By the time he got outside the rain had stopped and the only evidence that it had poured all morning were puddles that pocked the street. Three months before, for three days, secretive groups of men in the Electric company’s uniforms, huddled over large maps that curled and boiled in the wind. They ordered other men to attack the street with machines that shredded the asphalt and punched holes which invariably missed the cable they were looking for. Then, as suddenly as they appeared, they retreated, and the three trucks that had reconnoitered the underground withdrew slowly leaving the holes unfilled.

A few days later, early in the morning, the electric company returned. They filled the craters to half their depth, set up small barricades in front of the deepest holes, hung flashing lanterns on nails driven into the stripped wooden slats, and retreated again. As the trucks withdrew neighborhood adolescents garnered the lamps and pulled over the barricades. After that, there was a constant stream of people in Hondas vaulting into the holes and cursing.

The sidewalk was not a good place to try to learn how to fly. It was crowded with an assortment of religious people walking aimlessly up and down. The safest place to learn to fly seemed to be the middle of the road because as soon as drivers turned onto the one way street they sensed something about it was wrong. They intuited ‘holes’ and swung with a screech to the side and inched down the street clinging to the sidewalk.

Halfway down the street he found a spot relatively unscarred by the electric company and decided it was a perfect place to learn to fly.

He realized immediately that he had no idea how flying was done. He looked around for a large bird to imitate, a stork or a vulture, something with a heavy and ungainly body that it had to launch into the air.

The only birds around were pigeons poking along the curb for a meal. He lurched at them screaming “fly, fly,” frightening them into the air. But the act of encouraging them jarred his concentration and he could not see what they did to get themselves off of the ground.

Nick Strayte realized at once that he was not going to learn to fly from pigeons. He sat down to think the matter over. Cars wobbled around him honking their horns brutally.

The realization slammed into him that no one he knew could fly, not even flap an inch off of the ground. His mind screeched to a halt as the driver who passed in a 1974 Buick planed into the hole nearest him and screamed at him.

He struggled with the problem for a while, completely mystified, until suddenly “Superman” echoed in his mind and he looked up to see the figure of the Man of Steel standing by his side. His costume was neat and clean, brighter than Strayte had imagined it. Only a few incongruities. The Superman who stood before him was middle aged, a little short and had a slight pot belly.

“It’s not easy,” was the first thing Superman said. “You have to be from a different planet to be able to fly naturally.” While he was struggling to remember which planet he was from, Strayte noticed that Superman’s mouth moved only after the sound came out and he was sure what words he was going to say.

Nick Strayte was watching Superman intently when a small voice in his head whispered quietly, “Superman is a comic book character. You’ve gone round the bend. Get up and refer yourself to a psychiatrist.”

Superman spoke again.”If you listen to that smart ass you’ll never have any fun. I can help you fly,” he volunteered cheerfully, “if you really want to. Why do you want to?”

Nick Strayte thought about it for a minute.” I’m not sure exactly.”

“You’d better be damned sure,” Superman said, “because if you get off the ground and you ever ask yourself why you are flying, you crash immediately. You come down like a rock, and the law of gravity holds twice as strongly so you come down at instantaneous speed weighing about,” he looked at Strayte and made a quick calculation in his head, “three tons in your case. And since you’re not from Krypton there wouldn’t be any more of you left than a smear. You better think about it”

“I…I….” Nick Strayte tried hard to remember why he wanted to fly. “I….”

“You want to escape,” Superman said flatly.

That’s right,” Nick Strayte said in amazement. “You read my mind.”

Superman laughed a hearty comic book laugh.”I’m afraid that would be out of the question just now. No, it’s just what flying is about.”

“My mind’s working.” Nick Strayte protested, “otherwise how would you be here?”

“Well perhaps a very tiny part of your mind is working,” Superman conceded. “The important thing is that you wanted to learn how to fly. I know how to fly. I haven’t done a good deed yet today. I thought you would be my first good deed for the day. This is the way you fly,” Superman said. His voice was adult and deliberate, as if he were talking to a three year old.”You stand on your tippy toes, reach as high with your hands as you can and think a good thought. Think of some good deed you want to do.”

Nick Strayte stood up on his toes and struggled for balance.”Does it have to be both feet, I mean on the toes of both feet?” It was an unreasonable demand. Superman nodded solemnly. After a few minutes Strayte managed to balance himself on the toes of both his feet.

“Think a good thought,” Superman prompted.

Nick Strayte tried thinking a good thought but his mind refused.

“Think a reasonable thought,” Superman screamed at him.

Strayte focused his mind to a blur.

“Leap, leap up!,” Superman cried and took off.

Nick Strayte flopped ignominiously to the ground landing in a puddle in one of the gashes the electric company had ripped in the street. He pulled his face out of the mud, spitting the dirt and scum out of his mouth and feeling rancid city sludge coat his body.

Superman did an artistic back flip and landed by Strayte’s side. He looked at him sympathetically.

“It might work,” he said, “if you think of something bad, an injustice that needs to be overcome. “Try again.” Nick Strayte pulled himself up. His shirt and pants were soaked in mud and grime.

Superman helped him straighten up. “It’s not easy. I told you. Look, perhaps I can help a little. Take off your shirt and pants and I’ll give you my Superman suit. That might help.”

Nick Strayte got out of his muddied shirt which had a large splotchy stain where Superman’s had a large S. Superman took off his cape and removed the top of his costume.”It’s very light. It helps the lift.” Strayte pulled on the blouse like top. It was diaphanous, lighter and sheerer than any fabric Nick Strayte had ever seen. He slipped the cape on.

“Try again,” Superman insisted. “The preparation is very important. Think about some wrong you want to right.” Strayte stood up.

A telephone rang in Nick Strayte’s mind. He picked up the receiver gingerly. Dean Grundle had yelled at him ever since Strayte had enraged him by undressing during the debate in the faculty senate on censoring the student newspaper for printing what the dean argued was a pornographic photo. Since the rumors of sexual harassment had first surfaced, Dean Grundle had tightened his voice into a dull, unintelligible screech. Only this time Dean Grundle wasn’t yelling at all. His voice was clear and mellow and filled with a temperate good humor.

“The college administration has decided to get rid of you. We’re going to revoke your tenure. I’m arranging a hearing on the sexual harassment charges. It’s only a formality, understand. You’re finished. Sorry old man. How’s your cat? Drop by sometime and perhaps we can talk. I’ve got appointments until next year but perhaps sometimes after that.” The phone in Nick Strayte’s mind clicked out.

Strayte turned sideways and Marsha was sitting there on the curb, glaring at him.

“Why?” he asked her.

“Because.”

“I never harassed you. I never even touched you, for Christ’s sake. Only that once and…”

“You wouldn’t give me the exam.”

“We’ve been through it. It wouldn’t be good for you. Even for him, it wouldn’t…”

She did not let him finish. “I wanted it. You wouldn’t give it to me.”

There was no use arguing, no use complaining to her, no use trying to get her to change her mind. He had made a mistake and he was going to pay for it. He raised himself on his toes again.

“Fly, fly,” Superman screamed.

“Shit,” Nick Strayte heard The Man of Steel grunt, and he felt himself falling into the puddle again.

Chapter 2

The warning shot warns the shooter

Helen O’Rourke thought about the phrase spray painted on the sidewalk. Next to the sentence was a realistic drawing of the same revolver she had tucked under the black woolen coat she was wearing as part of her disguise. The drawing of the revolver had an arrow pointing at the trigger and a squirrel peeking its head out of the barrel.

It was a warning of danger close by. She looked around cautiously but the only out of the ordinary thing she saw was her partner, Billy Bekinski, lifting his habit and rocking hypnotically on his toes. He was dressed as a nun. She wore the long black coat and wide brimmed hat of a Hasidic rabbi.

“For sweet Jesus’ sake stop it. You’re supposed to be a nun not a ballet dancer.”

“Stop what?” he wanted to know.

“Stop the rocking,” she howled at him in a whisper.

“Was I rocking? It’s this long skirt. I wish I was wearing pantyhose. How do I look? Do I look religious? Do I look like I believe?” He thought of Sister Grace, his fifth grade parochial school teacher at Conception of the Immaculate Mother parochial school. No wonder she was so mean. He remembered her screaming at the class. “Do you think I like to be mean? I would like to be a quiet slip of a meditative creature devoted to God and his Church. But you bastards won’t let me will you. You don’t listen, you don’t give a…you don’t care about God.” She lifted her ruler. “If you wore this habit just once you would know what I mean,” then the ruler came down on some unredeemed soul, usually him. Finally, Billy knew what she meant.

It was a powerful costume. As soon as you put it on you knew who you were, what you had been called upon to do. Billy Bekinski knew it was like that with some outfits. They came with lives wrapped up in them, and they let these lives loose on you the moment you slipped into them. For the first time he really knew what she meant.

Helen O’Rourke didn’t want to be an undercover street cop, continuously trying to prove that she was ready to risk her neck so that no one would actually force her to risk it. It tired her out. She had never wanted to be a policewoman at all. At different times when she was growing up she had wanted to be a poet, a literary critic, and a mathematician. Finally, just before she became a police officer she decided that what she really wanted to be was a college professor.

Her teachers encouraged her. They praised the power and fluidity of her mind. They lauded her discipline and creativity. Her family praised her figure and lauded her cooking. They encouraged her to get married as quickly as possible. Their indifference to her aspirations did not bother her because she realized that their insensibility stemmed mostly from the fact that lived in a world only four blocks long and five blocks wide.

Her father was a cop. He forced his affection for the force and the social solidity it afforded, on her two brothers who became cops and she was left to pursue whatever interests caught her fancy. Her mother was convinced that her pretentious infatuation with words and ideas would pass as soon as one of the stream of men her brothers brought home from the station house caught her fancy. Until the very end she seemed spared the limitations of her family.

But, at the time she entered her senior year in college, one of her brothers was killed and the other paralyzed in the same botched police operation and her father turned to her, in desperation, to carry his attachment to the force forward. She could not deny him. After she graduated from college with honors in Philosophy and English she took the examination for the police force.

She scored higher than anyone who had taken the test in a decade. After she graduated from the academy, they gave her a partner, assigned her to patrol car and noted on her record that she might not be suitable for police work.

Her partner’s two abiding interests, dressing up in costumes and trying to get into her pants, were a constant distraction.

It was partly her fault. One night, bored and distracted she had given into his pleading.

“Oh, for God’s sake let me touch it at least,” he whined. “The body’s the ultimate costume. Share it with me.” It was the first time he expressed anything like a poetic vision and she let herself be persuaded by what she knew was merely his dressing up in words.

She thought it might revive her interest in sex but his thrashing only irritated her and her mind wandered, but when he started to pull his pants down she un-holstered her Smith and Wesson and reminded him they were on duty. She said it as if there might be another time, even soon, but there never was.

“You’re a stuck up Jewish virgin,” Billy Bekinski insisted as he buttoned his pants. He had met a Jewish virgin once and she had made an indelible impression on him. He thought of all Jewish women as virgins even though a couple of hookers he knew said they were Jewish.

“I go to the same church as you do, you idiot,” she answered him. She ignored the virgin part.

She was not a virgin. No part of her had been a virgin for a long time. During her last two years in college she had a lover. He was one of her former professors, Bill Taylor, an ex-priest who taught philosophy.

He taught logic, but his specialty seemed to be literary scandals and philosophical gossip. He had an encylopaedic knowledge of liaisons and affairs two thousand years old as well as those that were still in progress. His passion was reserved for questions about order and disorder in contemporary literature and philosophy. She adopted that problem as her own. Their affair ended twice, first, strangled by distance when he left the college to occupy a chair of Secular theology at Berkeley in California and then again, explosively, a second time when he wrote her his news.

Each time Billy Bekinski did something outrageous she thought of requesting another partner. But she had seen what was available and most of it was macho debris and a constant and manifest threat. Her peers were like her brothers, her superiors like her father.

Billy Bekinski had one redeeming virtue. His aversion to danger was greater than her own. When he wasn’t fussing over some detail of his ensemble, he was constantly vigilant, his eyes sweeping around in choppy 360 degree circles looking for danger to avoid. With his cowardness in the drivers seat next to her she felt safe.

“I like to dress up in costumes,” Billy Bekinski had confessed to her on their first tour of duty together.

“I would have never guessed,” Mary O’Rourke said, looking at his non-regulation holster and socks that had COPS in bright fluorescent Green embroidered where they grasped the calf. He was wearing a Micky Mouse beany on his head.

“No, I really mean dress up in costumes,” Billy said. “I don’t usually tell people right away because, because, they don’t understand. They think I’m queer,” he complained. “But since we are going to be partners, I thought you better know.”

“As long as your costume includes your pants and your gun, I couldn’t care less what you dress up in,” Helen O’Rourke said.

Billy Bekinski relaxed. He had expected a different response. His mother had beaten him when she caught him dressing up in her underwear.

“What the hell are you doing in my lingerie, you monster?” his mother had screamed. “Take it off, take it off,” and rushed around wildly before she found something that she wouldn’t damage to beat him with.

When he took it off, he stood before her naked. “You’re naked,” she howled and threw the lingerie at him. When he put it on, she had him walk around in it for a while. “You look better than I do in it. You can have it. I’m sorry I lost my temper,” she said. “It’s my only really nice piece of underwear.”

His father beat him when he found him wearing one of his condoms on his head. “What are you queer or something,” he yelled and grabbed an ashtray and hurled it at his son hitting him on the side of the head and knocking him to the floor. “It’s the only one I have. It’s for show, you crap head, not to wear.” He helped his son up. “I’m sorry,” he said taking the condom from his son’s head. He looked it over. “Keep it,” he growled. “You’ve stretched it. Anyway, it was old. I’ll get another. Be careful. You never can tell,” he advised his son.

The nuns beat him when he wore his Halloween costume to school. Deftly avoiding the false ear he was wearing and grabbing him by the real one, Sister Grace lifted him from his seat. “What in Saint Francis’s name do you think you are,” she said as she pounded on his head. “There’s only one outfit you wear to school, you demon.” When she ripped the hat off and saw the condom on his head she laced into him. “You don’t know how to be a Christian,” she screamed. “Not even a Protestant would come to school in, in that.” She tore it off his head. “I’ll teach you how to dress properly and if it’s the only thing you learn at least…” She cracked him in the ear and that was the last thing he heard for a week.

People had not been so indifferent to his dressing up. He liked Helen O’Rourke right away.

Billy Bekinski had chosen to become a cop because of the gun. It was the ultimate in dressing up. It was a piece of dress up that no other costume even came close to. After he graduated from the academy he was put on a beat. He did not like it. People did not understand that he was dressing up. They confused his costume with the uniform of a police officer and expected him to do what people wearing that kind of uniform did, like break up fights and stop people from robbing stores—and he was not prepared to go that far just for the sake of an outfit. After a while he was assigned a partner and put in a patrol car because of his spotless record of neatness and well grooming.

It was less interesting than the street. There was less opportunity for really dressing up. And his partner, Helen O’Rourke, whom he liked, had no interest in dressing up. She had few interests at all as far as he could see except mumbling stories and unintelligible problems that made no sense. Except the time she let him feel her up and slip his hand in her pants they had a platonic arrangement, although the prospect of doing it to her had kept him going for a long time. Sometimes, when they had the night shift, he said he was tired and wanted to take a nap and crept into the back seat while she drove. Although he knew it was a bad thing he closed his eyes and imagined himself as an arch criminal and raped her.

After he was on the force for a few years he got bored and decided to quit. Even though he had talked Helen into stopping every couple of hours so that he could get out and parade around for fifteen minutes, the allure of the uniform had gone away.

A tragedy kept him on the force. After a botched bust in which six undercover officers had been wounded or killed there were openings in the undercover section of the police department.

The sergeant who ran the section told him that if he were willing to wear really outrageous clothes he could work undercover a lot because most of the men hated to dress up like a bum or an old queen or a rich Japanese tourist and preferred to sit in a warm squad car waiting for the simulated Japanese tourist or old queen to be assaulted at which point they could pull out their gun, roll down their window and shoot the perp.

Billy persuaded his partner to apply for a position in the undercover department with him. “Helen,” he pleaded, “we could go together. We could be a pair. If you really want to understand disorder and early sorrow in modern society it’s the best way to see it, I mean as a Japanese tourist.” For some reason she could never understand, it made sense to Helen O’Rourke.

Undercover work was a part time proposition. Most of the time he and Helen still rode around in a patrol car. When there was undercover work to be done the sergeant called them and they left the car in the garage and dressed up.

Billy found the work exciting. Sometimes on one of these jobs he forgot who he was, and when the criminal took the bait he offered and held him up or mugged him or picked his pocket, Billy Bekinski screamed and screamed for the police until, over the earphone he usually wore came the message, ‘you are the police, you smuck,’ whereupon he remembered who he was and took the appropriate action, usually by running away.

He hated stake outs when he would be dressed up as a Japanese tourist and the criminal would unexpectedly show up before he decided whether the camera belonged over the left shoulder or the right. Even more, he hated vice operations where he was dressed up as a prostitute and had to arrest a john before he really got a chance to savor the richness of the costume. The worst operations of all were stakeouts when he had just settled into his disguise and another crime interrupted his prancing up and down, and he had to pull out the ankle pistol he wore under his boots and threaten the perp and pretend the gun was a real gun instead of a prop. But, as much as he complained, he loved undercover work.

The operation they were engaged in was not typical. Its demands had exhausted the resources of the usual team available for undercover work and the department had reached out and shanghaied regular street cops to dress up in various costumes—which meant that it involved a lot of amateurs who had no appreciation of what it meant to wear a disguise.

He was dressed as a nun and his partner as a Hasidic rabbi.

Originally Helen O’Rourke was assigned to be the nun and he was to dress up as the rabbi but the nun’s costume was much more impressive to Billy. He begged her to switch. “I want to be the nun,” he pleaded. “I would make a much realer nun. Anyway, the nun’s habit just wouldn’t suit you, you’re Jewish,” he argued.

“I’m not Jewish, you idiot. I’m Catholic like you. Can’t you remember anything?”

“I forgot,” he whined. “I forgot.” He only remembered that when he had gotten one hand down far enough in her pants to feel the silky hair of her cunt and started undoing his pants with the other, she pulled out her Smith and Wesson and reminded him they were on duty. He always thought about her as Jewish after that. In the end she gave in and Billy inserted himself into the habit of the Sister of Mercy.

Helen O’Rourke thought again about the saying spray painted on the sidewalk. They were after a fanatic who seemed to have a grudge against believers of any kind. He had slashed several people without regard to creed as long as they appeared to be religious; nuns, priests, hasidim, a few mullahs, a Jehovah’s Witness and a Baptist who was wearing a large button announcing Jesus was on his way.

The police had seeded the streets where the most recent attacks had occurred with assorted religious looking characters who wandered up and down, performing various religious devotions. Billy had objected because the presence of so many people in costumes distracted him. “They’re amateurs,” he complained to the sergeant in charge of his street. “They don’t even look religious,” he said, pointing to two Orthodox Jews walking down the sidewalk.

“They are not cops, you idiot,” the sergeant said and turned away in disgust. Billy who always knew that dressing up in a costume was different from dressing for life was not reassured. It tormented him that a costume could be authentic but not convincing.

Until he flopped on the ground and began thrashing in the puddle of water that had accumulated in the street, the police ignored Nick Strayte, even though he was in the center of their action. He did not seem interested in any of the disguised policeman parading up and down the street. When he started splashing, the sergeant who was supervising the stakeout screamed to Billy and Helen O’Rourke through the earphones they wore under their costumes that they should get rid of the distraction because he would certainly scare off the perp.

“You two, the nun and the rabbi. You’re closest. Get rid of that kook. He’s going to scare off our kook.”

Billy and Helen veered off from the sidewalk on which “The warning shot warns the shooter” had whispered its message to Helen O’Rourke.

“What do you think you are doing?” Billy Bekinski screamed at the man floundering in the puddle.

Nick Strayte looked up. “I’m learning to fly,” he said ingenuously, hoping Superman who was standing quietly off to the side might speak up. He pointed to his chest showing them the large letter S. “Superman has lent me his cape and Superman shirt.”

The Nun kicked him. “Get up.” Strayte rose unsteadily.

Billy looked the pathetic creature over carefully, searching for some element of a costume that might identify the problem at hand. He immediately resented this man who publicly broadcast his craziness by insisting that he was wearing half a costume when he was really only half naked in soaked and soiled underwear . “He’s nuts,” he announced. Helen O’Rourke was slightly more sympathetic. The face on the man on the street seemed vaguely familiar.

Strayte squeezed out an unintelligible protest. Superman, who stood along side of him, ignored the scene. From somewhere he had gotten a long plastic comb and was running it through his hair.

“Get dressed and get out of here you nut,” the nun screeched. Strayte realized the futility of protest and was bending down, reaching for his pants when a figure bounded out of the shadows of a nearby hallway and threw himself on the Rabbi and the Nun, pummeling them until they fell to the ground. Strayte, with his pants half on but still firmly in possession of the cape, felt the urge to do the right thing or what seemed like the right thing at the moment. He spoke up loudly. “This is a job for Superman,” he said and looked around expecting the Man of Steel to leap into the struggle but Superman had disappeared. Strayte felt helpless, as the hulk in front of him battered the two figures on the ground.

“Crap,” he said to himself and heaved himself on the flailing assailant. From all around him he heard people running but no one was close enough to do anything. He watched as the assailant pulled out a knife. “This is a job for Superman,” he said and struck out at the thrashing form who seemed to be taking a butchers aim at the smaller of the figures on the ground in front of him. Strayte punched him again. The figure stepped back in disgust. “A demon of Satan in disguise,” the knife wielder cried, confused by the secular appearance of the nearly naked figure in front of him. “An Anabaptist,” he decided, just as Strayte, feeling the cold and wetness for the first time, punched him again. Shifting the position of the knife the creature pulled up and lunged at Strayte just as the first of an assorted crowd of figures leapt on him.

“We’ve got him,” a Buddhist Bonze cried. Strayte sat back down on the ground.

“Who’s he?” one of the religious figures yelled, pointing at Strayte.

“He’s crazy,” the Nun on the ground screamed.

“He saved your buns,” the sergeant said, eyeing the knife on the ground.

“He’s still crazy,” the Nun screamed louder. “He thinks he’s wearing a costume.”

Excited from the arrest of the perpetrator the sergeant congratulated the men and women close by who were in the process of discarding pieces of their disguises. “Hey, don’t throw those things on the ground,” the sergeant yelled, “they’re rented.” The assorted religious figures paid no attention to him and milled around undressing.

“Put both of them into a patrol car and take them to the station. We’ll sort it out there,” the sergeant ordered.

The Hasidic rabbi, shorn now of curly sideburns and black hat and transformed miraculously into a woman came up to Strayte. “Thank you. Do I know you from somewhere? I’ve seen you before.”

Strayte sat motionless on the ground. Superman had abandoned him. He was not going to learn to fly. He was stuck with his troubles. He began to sob softly. The crying released Helen O’Rourke’s memory. “You’re Dr. Strayte. You’re a professor at the college.”

Nick Strayte sobbed louder. He was trapped in who he was forever.

Chapter 3

Armies never surrender at night

Poepple Schwartz collected witty sayings. He hoped if he accumulated enough of them he could publish a book. He called them Corkscrews because each of them had a curl, a kink, and a point, although sometimes the point was hard to figure out. As he drove the horse wagon looking for crazies he carefully reviewed his collection.

His eyes danced over the neatly written sentences until they tripped on “Armies never surrender at night.” The sketchy notes he took told him he had seen it on an army recruiting poster between the wars which were their own advertisements for the military.

When he first saw this particular corkscrew he thought it was part of the poster but then he realized it had been carefully penciled by someone to make it look like part of the poster, which made it interesting. Its meaning was a mystery to him when he encountered it and it was a mystery now. He had copied it into the book he carried around for copying sayings into and forgotten it.

He tried to figure out what it meant but not too hard. He had stopped really struggling hard to decipher the sayings he collected because of his experience a few summers before when he strained so hard to unravel the meaning of one of the odd sentences thathead collected, he got lost in some dark and dank place in his mind and had to drive himself in the horse wagon to Vermeers.

Poepple Schwartz worked for Doppler Universal Transportation for years—ever since he graduated high school. He was on call on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the evening after 6. The other two evenings he worked as an assistant to the dispatcher in the company’s cramped office in City Hall although he was the dispatcher most nights because the dispatcher moonlighted as a security guard. When he was on call he got into whatever van was available that night and drove around. It was usually the horse wagon. He didn’t pay any attention to the fact that he was driving a vehicle used during the day to transport horses. He loved picking up crazy people.

The company Poepple Schwartz worked for was formerly the Monrow city transportation office, a branch of the Monrow city government. During a fiscal crisis the mayor convinced the city council that the job of moving what the city needed to be moved could be done more cheaply by a private company and the city sold the office and the city’s fleet of vans and trucks to the Mayor’s nephew who started a company, Doppler Universal Transportation, for the purpose of buying it. Although the company was seven years old, they had not yet moved out of the city offices. The city treasurer was still in the process of pricing the vehicles and calculating a proper rent for the city office and garage, so Doppler was paying nothing for the space in city hall or the vans and trucks. Because of their low overhead they charged rock bottom prices and even with the exorbitant salary the mayor’s nephew paid himself, no one could compete with them.

“See,” the mayor told the council, “I told you we could save money.”

The city council nodded their collective heads and one of them made a motion to immediately sell off the city’s medical and legal services but none of the mayor’s relatives was a doctor or a lawyer so he drew the line firmly. “Think of the people who work for the city,” he insisted. “For the sake of a few pennies, should we throw our loyal workers out in the street?”

Doppler Transportation moved anything for anyone, anytime. Doppler moved undesirables, lost children, the infirmed, trees, messages, animals—horses mostly—corpses, stumps. At night mostly they moved non-medical emergencies from one place to another. Non-medical emergencies meant crazy people.

Most of the people who went crazy in town were collected privately by the new private hospital for the mentally ill. Everyone called it CTTL which stood for the Center for the Treatment of the Temporarily Lapsed. They had their own shiny new silver ambulance with bunk restraining beds in the back and a siren that played the Beattle’s song ‘You’ve Got A Friend,’ when it was blaring.

The new hospital had the crazy business for the mentally ill with insurance tied up tight. CTTL had paid off the doctors in the city to call them first if someone went crazy in their office or they came across a crazy person who had medical insurance or was with someone who had medical insurance. They also persuaded the city’s tow truck companies to sign up as auxiliary mental health teams which meant they could collect crazies and bring them to the hospital—if they had medical insurance. But CTTL depended on the police for their near monopoly on the insane in Monrow.

When CTTL first opened it simply paid patrolman for crazy people by the head, so that when the police got a call that involved a crazy person or a person acting crazy, the first thing they did was check if he or she had medical insurance. If they did, they called CTTL to come and get them. For this service CTTL remembered them with a check at Christmas time.

But after a while, in order to control their expenses, CTTL instituted a set of cost cutting measures and the price for a referral of a crazy person suddenly depended on the patient load in the hospital that week and how crazy the person was. If their craziness was short term and if it could be cured by a pill there was one price. If it was long term and required intervention by someone on the staff like a nurse or psychiatrist or a handyman, there was another price. When the hospital was filled nearly to capacity the price of a crazy person dropped precipitously.

The police adapted quickly to these contingencies:

When a call involved a crazy person they arrested them and took them to the station house. A crazy person gave them a chance to have a cup of coffee, relax and shoot the breeze. In the station house they had a chance to look the crazy person over carefully and take a quick look at the AMA Psychiatric Manual which they kept near the water cooler. If the crazy person had a card announcing which company insured them, the arresting officer consulted a list of companies that was posted in over the desk of the sergeant on duty. If the company was O.K., he called the hospital in a disguised voice. “My uncle is acting crazy. Can I get him into CTTL today or tomorrow?”

If the answer was yes he said, “I’ll bring my uncle right over,” and hung up. Then he called the hospital again using his real voice. “This is officer Flugle, F L U G L E. I’ve got a crazy person down at the station house. Come fetch him.”

If the answer was no, they booked the person as a vagrant and tossed them into the city’s lockup to be retrieved when CTTL’s patient load went down.

If the lunatic did not have a card, the police searched them after their coffee break to make sure they were not hiding a medical insurance card on their body somewhere. If the person absolutely and certainly did not have medical insurance the police would do different things depending on how crazy the crazy person was acting.

Sometimes they scolded him and let him go. Other times, especially if the person was agitated and irritating, they beat him and sent him to the hospital as a case needing medical attention. If they were mild and unobtrusive they called Doppler Transportation for the Loony Tunes wagon. The police hated crazies.

When the mayor’s nephew complained to the police chief that the police were ripping off his business by calling CTTL, the police chief shrugged. “Every one’s got to make a living.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” the mayor’s nephew complained.

“What principle?” the police chief wanted to know. “Dog eat dog, or blessed are the relatives of the mayor for they only get the uninsured crazies.” He laughed at the joke until tears flowed down his cheeks. “Besides,” he spit out between paroxysms of laughter, “it motivates the men.”

When his nephew complained to his uncle the mayor, he was reminded that it was a matter of principle. “There are other people who have to make a living too,” ‘Other people’ included the mayor, who was listed for accounting purposes with CTTL as an honorary patrolman in every car the city police had on the street.

Poepple Schwartz did not really care where the crazies went. He only felt the loss of contributors to his book of clever sayings. Crazy people in the first full rush of their insanity often said things he could put in his book. He felt deprived of a unique source of Corkscrews.

His boss liked Poepple. None of the other drivers who worked at night looked for crazies. What they looked for was women they could pick up and screw in the back of the vans, on one of the cushioned cots they carried around for moving unconscious people. They cruised around until they found a lady who thought it might be exciting to make love in a van with flashing lights and a siren that could be turned on even when the vehicle was not in motion.

When they found a interested lady they called the office.

“I’ve been stopped by a pedestrian who has an sick uncle who may need to be taken to the morgue. I’m going to investigate.”

The only person who ever needed to be taken to the morgue was a driver who got more in the back of his van one night than he had bargained for. A petite voice reported anonymously to the office on the van phone that whoever he was, the driver had died in the full flush of his manhood and was in his van at—she gave the address—and he needed to be taken to the morgue, and she didn’t have time to really dress him because her husband was coming home from work, and goodby.

In order to drum up business Poepple Schwartz drove around and if he saw anyone who was acting crazy he put a call through to his office in a disguised voice and reported there was a mentally deranged person at a particular location. Then the dispatcher would call him and send him to that location.

The call was a necessary inconvenience because it was against the law to cruise around and pick up a crazy person and take them to a hospital unless the person had already been diagnosed as crazy in which case they could be picked up. Of course, most of the time a patient had to be brought into a hospital be diagnosed and the law, of course, forbade picking up crazy people and taking them to a mental hospital just to be diagnosed. But the law did allow a person to be picked up as long as someone reported the crazy person was acting crazy to an authorized transportation company. Then they could be taken to a hospital to be diagnosed.

Poepple Schwartz did not mind making the call, although when he was also acting dispatcher for the night he would have to call himself in a disguised voice, log the call, and then call and order himself on the mobile phone to pick up the crazy. That, he felt, was a little much.

The evening had been uneventful until Poepple noticed a man in the middle of a street whose sidewalks were flooded with people dressed as the orthodox of various religions. He was acting as crazy as you could act. Poepple Schwartz watched as he peeled off his clothes and went through the motions of exchanging pieces of clothing with an imaginary being.

In Poepple’s experience cases like this were experiencing a delusion of talking to some comic book superhero. When the Batman movie came out, the number of people confiding in Batman rose exponentially for a while. Occasionally people conversed with Dick Tracy or Flash Gordon or Popeye. But usually it was Superman, because he had been in four movies while other superheroes had been in at most one or two. He watched the man put on some sort of invisible costume that seemed to have a cape. From the way the man stood Poepple decided it was positively Superman. The man fastened the imaginary cape around his neck, slipped into what Poepple supposed on the basis of the motions was the top of the Superman costume, stood on his toes and flopped into a puddle on the ground. A Hasidic Rabbi and a Nun went over to the man and while they were helping him up and Poepple was ready to call the dispatcher all hell broke loose.

Someone jumped out of a doorway and attacked the Nun and the Rabbi and there was a fight and the crazy man fought with the man who had jumped out of the doorway and then all the religious people on both sidewalks pulled out guns and converged on the people struggling on the street. After a while he couldn’t quite make out what was happening because the entire street was filled with a wild crowd of religious figures behaving like it was an ecumenical mardi gras. He waited to see what was going to happen.

While he was waiting, Poepple Schwartz saw the tow trucks pull up and the drivers get out. He knew they would show up sooner or latter. They always listened in on police bands for calls about accidents or crazy people. He knew them all personally even though they were competitors.

As soon as they saw the crazy man, half naked in his underwear, the towtruck drivers realized he could not possibly have an insurance card on him and most of them sped off. But others wandered around trying to pick up female cops who were still dressed in religious costumes. Some of the policewomen who were dressed as men pushed the tow truck drivers around, and some of the policemen dressed as women flirted. As Poepple watched, a crowd of people from the neighborhood gathered, drawn by the entertainment of a lot of people wandering around in costumes and men chasing men and women and women chasing women and men.

After a while a sergeant got up on the roof of a police car and spoke over a megaphone. Poepple was close enough to see his lips move. “If you are not a police person please leave the scene, go away now,” he screamed as politely as possible. “Leave the premises immediately. Those officers who were on undercover duty should retrieve the pieces of the disguises that they have discarded and come to the police van at the corner for further instructions.”

The megaphone translated his message into snap, crackle and pop. The police immediately decided the unintelligible communication was a command for them to leave and go home and started drifting away. The onlookers, who had come for the entertainment, stayed so they could watch the various nuns and ministers and bonzes and brightly dressed Hari Krisna’s undressing. As the undercover policemen discarded pieces of clothing on the street the onlookers picked them up and put them on. The sergeant jumped up and down on the roof of the police car. He raised the megaphone to his mouth again and screamed. “No, no. Which of you are cops? Will those of you who are cops raise your hands,” he bellowed, dancing like a bear on the slippery top of the patrol car.

The megaphone translated his voice into a garbled slur. The few police officers who had heard the message raised their hands. Seeing other people raising their hands, everyone raised their hand. The sergeant danced some more on the roof of the car. “Shit,” he screamed. The megaphone passed the message through to the crowd. The sergeant threw the megaphone to the ground. “Everyone who has a gun take it out,” he howled in desperation, “and chase the people without guns away.” Everyone who had a gun took it out and waved it. There was no one without a gun. “Shit,” the sergeant said again. “Shit,” and climbed down and got into the police car and drove away.

Poepple Schwartz watched as the Nun and the Hasidic Rabbi shed their garb and became police officers. They handcuffed the man who had attacked them to the nearly naked man who had been talking to Superman. Then they put them in the back of a patrol car, and drove off.

He had lost the potential client. It was not his fault. But it was only temporary. It was only a matter of time. Rather than driving to the station house and waiting for the call he knew would come, he decided to ride around and try to get laid. Eventually they would call him. There was no way the crazy man had a medical insurance card on him.

~~

After they parked at the station house Helen and Billy took both of the men into the station house and pushed them down on a bench.

Dressed in a suit and tie, the man who had assaulted the police officers looked sympathetically at Nick Strayte. “Do you believe in God?” he asked. “God is a great comfort in times of trouble. If people are truly religious they need trouble. It brings them closer to God. I’m only doing his will. ‘Make every man a Job,’ he told me. If I were God I think I would have thought of a more efficient way of bring people closer to me, but who can question the ways of the Almighty. The nun and the rabbi were only going to hurt you anyway,” he insisted. “You should have let me hurt them,” he said, “for their own good.” His voice rose as two detectives came and led him away for questioning, “Superman wasn’t lifting a finger to help you was he?” he screamed, “I would have helped you.”

The reference to Superman confused Nick Strayte. He sat alone on the bench, the half open pair of handcuffs dangling from his wrist. It was a warm spring night but he was freezing. After a half hour Helen O’Rourke came over to him.

“Are you cold?” she asked?

He tried to say yes but nothing came out. She went down to the room where they kept the disguises that the undercover department used and got a ratty sable coat that had two bullet holes in the back and a slit in the front, under the left breast, which had been made by a knife, and brought it up and laid it over his shoulders.

Nick Strayte sat silently in his underwear and fur coat and watched the normal chaos around him as undercover cops drifted in and shed the parts of the costumes they had not discarded at the scene on the floor.

“Has he said anything?” the sergeant asked Helen O’Rourke.

“No,” she answered.

“Call the Loony Tunes wagon and take him outside and wait for them there. He’s disturbing the peace and quiet of this place.”

She took Nick Strayte outside and sat him down on the steps of the stations house. “I remember a little of a lecture you gave at the college,” she said. “What you said about order and disorder in modern society was very interesting.” The lecture was memorable because it was the first approximation to a date she had had with Bill Taylor.

Nick Strayte tried to remember a lecture he had given about order and disorder but his mind wouldn’t work.

“Do you really think that our normal, everyday common sense world is just the ordinary way everyone is crazy?” Helen asked. Nick Strayte thought the idea was interesting but had no recollection of ever thinking it. He put his head on his hands and pretended to be a stone statue, thinking.

While they sat waiting for the Loony Tunes wagon to show up and collect its prize, Helen O’Rourke recapitulated as much of the lecture as she could remember.

“You said, if I remember correctly,” settling into being a college student again, “that in modern society chaos had moved to the center of our lives, that today it was the engine that drove change whereas yesterday it was what people changed to escape. Do I have it right?” she asked.

Strayte whose mind was producing only stone ideas swayed from side to side, pretending to be caught in a ferocious wind.

“I think that’s more or less right,” she continued, filling in for the silent professor. “Then you said that somehow contradiction and paradox had been brought into the center of our world. This is a little bit hard to remember,” she said, waiting for him to coax her a bit. When he continued swaying silently she continued.

“You said that families and clubs and communities, all of the little groups that make up our human world, had been nailed and screwed and glued together to make up a monstrous large system, system was the word you used. The world today was one giant system. Everywhere was glued to everywhere, everyone welded together to everyone.”

She set the ideas she remembered spinning furiously, trying to make up for the arid, idealess years she had spent in the front seat of a patrol car. “I remember you saying that it was only in the big world, the world system, that things happened. Do you remember?” she asked.

She took his silent motion as a no and continued.

“Then you pointed out that, while this big world was essential, it was invisible to us, that we could only see our little worlds, that only the little worlds in which we lived made sense to us.”

Her face darkened as she previewed the conclusion of his lecture. Empathetically, Strayte adjusted his stonelike patina of muck and dirt.

“You explained that as reasonable people we were driven to make the little worlds we lived in as reasonable and rational as possible. Am I right?” she asked and not waiting for him to answer she continued. “And that’s the rub, you said. Because the more rational we made these little worlds we lived in, the more they clashed with what made sense in the big world that was made up of all the little worlds.

“The more people try to make the worlds they can see and feel around them orderly, the more disorder they inject into the big world that these little orders make up because what makes sense in this big, invisible, system is lunacy in the small worlds in which all of us live our everyday life. And what was insane in these small worlds made good sense in the big system they made up. It was a recipe for chaos.” She relaxed. “Did I get it right, I mean the main ideas?” she asked.

Nick Strayte did not remember saying a single thing she talked about but even his stone mind could see what he was being called up to do. He hesitated before he tried to exercise his stone voice. “A+,” he said, “A+.”

Chapter 4

All of us are crazy but some of us wear our straight jackets only on formal occasions

Poepple Schwartz was working on an adolescent with purple hair trying to persuade her that the wagon he was driving was perfect for making passionate love.

“What is that thing?” she wanted to know.

“It’s a real horse wagon,” he explained. She was captivated.

“A real horse wagon?”

“Among other things. Transported the president’s horses,” he elaborated. It was better if even a horse wagon had a pedigree. “When Kennedy was shot he was taken in this to the hospital in Dallas.”

“Who’s Kennedy?” she wanted to know.

He retreated to firmer ground. “It’s a real horse wagon. Take a look, you can see,” he enticed.

“Well I don’t know. Why are you driving around in a horse wagon?” she inquired.

The real explanation was that all of the day time drivers used the vans and trucks and the hearse and old ambulance at night. They took them out and cruised the city trying to get laid as he was now. They had discovered a whole circuit of women who found it thrilling to make love in a hearse or an ambulance. The horse wagon was the least desirable vehicle for enticing women so the other drivers avoided it. But unless one of the day time drivers was sick in the hospital or had an anniversary, it was usually the only vehicle left by the time he came on duty. “It’s specially sexy, like making love outdoors in an open field,” he answered.

The girl was almost convinced when the call from the dispatcher came in. “We got a crazy at the station house Poepple. Go fetch it.”

“I’m afraid I have to go,” he told the girl who had just decided to see if making out in a horse van was different than making out in the back of a Taurus. He got out and put the sign saying Doppler Transportation, back on its usual place on the side of the horse van and set out.

When he got to the station the ex-hasid was waiting on the steps with the half naked man who now was wearing a fur coat.

“We called for the Loony Tunes wagon,” Helen O’Rourke said when he pulled up, “what the hell is that?”

He made up an explanation for her. “There was a mass nervous breakdown at an old age home,” he said. “All of the vans we usually use to transport the mentally ill are there. This was the only wagon that was available, sorry.”

Nick Strayte tried to get up but his feet were asleep. Helen O’Rourke helped him stand and she and Poepple Schwartz maneuvered him into the horse wagon. As he slid into the wagon she reached in to lift the coat from his back. Strayte growled.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “the coat has to go back to the prop room. Regulations. I’m really sorry.” Strayte growled again.

She shrugged and withdrew her hand. “O.K. I guess one disguise more or less won’t make a difference. She turned to the driver. “If you can get the coat away from him when you deliver him give me a call at the station house will you. I’m Helen O’Rourke.”

“Well Dr. Strayte I guess its time to go,” the policewoman said, turning to the professor. “I hope we’ll meet again under different circumstances. The lecture was fascinating.”

As she watched the horse wagon pull away she tried to focus on the ideas that Strayte had presented in the lecture. But her mind insisted on recalling what at the time was the most important aspect of the lecture and the reason she remembered it so well—Bill Taylor.

Early on the day of Strayte’s lecture, Dr. William Taylor spotted her walking to class and moved swiftly to her side. “Hello Miss O’Rourke,” he said.

“Dr. Taylor. I didn’t think you would remember me.” She had been a student in the ‘Problems of Contemporary Philosophy’ class he taught, but the course had been over for a month.

“For a girl whose parents are from County Cork you should have thought I couldn’t forget you. What are you doing this afternoon at 4 o’clock?”

“Why?” she asked.

“Someone from the Sociology department, Nick Strayte, is going to give a lecture this afternoon. If I remember the kinds of things that interested you in my class, I would think it would be just up your alley.”

“Are you asking me to go to a lecture with you?” she said directly.

“I guess I am,” he said, “is it a date?”

“Yes.” It was completely unexpected. When she was his student she had gone to his office to talk to him a few times and asked him questions in class but he never seemed to have singled her out for any special attention.

They sat together through the lecture and after it was over they went out for dinner and then to his place to drink Retsina and listen to jazz.

She was high on the music but otherwise sober when he suggested they make love. “Professors making it with students is a no no,” he said. “You know that and I know it. If we get involved it will have to be secret, stay a piece of the dark side of the college’s life. At least for the time being. Can I trust you, do you trust yourself, to live with that kind of relationship.”

She thought about it.”Yes,” she said.

“And if it turns out to be only one night?” he asked.

“I’m ready for that too,” she said. “But there is one complication. I’m a virgin.”

“So am I almost,” he said. “Be gentle with me.”

She knew what he meant. In his lectures he had revealed some of the details of his life. A year earlier he had been a priest in a small monastery in Kentucky. For some reason he could not make clear or did not want to make clear to a beginning class in philosophy, he left the church and came to teach at the college. She expected with the first rush of liberation from the strictures of celibacy that he had experimented, but whatever he had experienced had not blunted the exuberant awkwardness that she took for innocence.

Their first lovemaking set the pattern for all the time they spent in bed together.

The beginning was a conversation of loving gestures, a weaving together of stroking and playfulness, that defined the space in which their passion would take its form. It was a period during which lust was deferred and passion suspended to allow the muted variations of intimacy to emerge.

They tried to read one another’s mood, the nap and texture and grain of the desire that each of them brought to bed.

But this gentle phase exploded suddenly with an unexpected burst of passion. It changed so quickly that she could not anticipate it, so quickly that she could not adjust to it, so quickly that she could only respond by accepting and opening herself up to the chaos of it, embracing its disorder totally, making herself totally accessible to it.

The intense thrusting and forceful pressing, the coming together and pulling apart of bodies was indifferent to the spasms of pleasure that surged through her until they both abandoned themselves and collapsed, completely spent.

She denied that sex fueled their relationship. She denied it to him and she denied it to herself. It was easy to deny because, in a quite different way, their talking was as intense and erotic as their sex. It was different because she had to adapt her strength to her less equal intellectual position. He talked more because he had more to say. But in her listening and in her questions she defined his path and established the bounds on the territory they explored together.

And again, their first night together was a template for all of the nights of their relationship.

“He missed something,” he commented on Strayte’s lecture.

“What?”

“That’s the trouble, I’m not sure. Something was missing, I just can’t put my finger on it. What he said was right enough but a lot of it has been said before. O’Casey.”

“O’Casey who?”

“And an Irish lass like yourself,” he chided gently.

“Don’t patronize me with that Irish lass shit. Who are you talking about?”

“O’Casey was right. ‘Chassis’ rules our lives. The times have ‘chassis’ at their very core.”

She missed the allusion.

Bill Taylor identified the reference.”Sean O’Casey, the Irish playwright. He said ‘chassis’ when he meant chaos.”

She defended the times. “Just change, swift, sweeping change, changing faster than you male, macho ex–priest college professors feel comfortable with. It will settle down,” she asserted.

“No,” he said, puffing out his cheeks and making a funny face. His eyes clouded up and went dark. “No, we’ve let loose demons we won’t be able to control, ever. Computers, genetic engineering. It’s the God problem, I’m afraid. We studied it in priest school, darling. It’s the conundrum they give you as a final test to see if you enlightened enough to graduate. Everyone fails, but they send you out anyway. It’s really a test of humility.”

“What’s the God problem,” she wanted to know.

“I’ll tell you next time,” he said.

“What’s the God problem?” she asked him the next evening they were together, before they made love.

“Well, if you were God and you got up one morning bored and you wanted to make a creature, what creature would you make? There’s another version but it’s for postgraduates. You are God ready to make the world. How do you decide which creatures to make? Of course for a Ph.D they give you another one. If you were God how would you improve man? The men in the laboratory coats have gotten us into it this time.”

She defended science.” They’ll get us out. They always have. If there’s a God problem there’s a science answer,” she said. He looked at her as if it was the first time he was really seeing her. “There’s a chasm of time between us,” he said. “I love you very much. I wouldn’t have believed I was capable of it. I’ve loved you since I first saw you in my class.” Then they made love and the thick disorder would resolve itself into an exhausted disorder. “See,” he would say sadly, “you don’t know the half of it.”

For two semesters, she killed time until he finished teaching his classes by going to whatever lecture was available on campus. Since most of the talks were outside of her area of interest they were often incomprehensible. It did not make any difference. She opened her mind and let what was said flow over her and stored it up and carried it to him in bed where he helped her shape the flow and make sense of it.

In the middle of her senior year he was offered a professorship at Berkeley. He asked her to marry him but it was right after her brothers got shot and she felt she could not move. She felt it was unfair to pressure him to give up the opportunity and that they could keep up their relationship long distance, but their correspondence did not last until her first vacation. After he left, she lapsed into a sexual and intellectual hiatus.

Helen O’Rourke watched the horse wagon carrying Dr. Nick Strayte disappear around a corner. He would live the lecture he had given, not as an intellectual experience, but as the sour, shrunken existence in a lunatic asylum. His life had become an embodiment of the message of his lecture.

It was more or less the same message that she had gotten from Bill Taylor who had written her from somewhere in california—two years after their affair had been transformed in her memory to a scrap book photograph of a place she had lived as an adolescent for a while—that he just gotten married, California style, to another ex-priest whom he had met at the beach. Chaos and disorder.

~~

“You O.K.?, Poepple Schwartz asked the man huddled in the back of the horse van as he drove off.

Strayte tried to croak at him but nothing came out.

“I understand,” the driver said.

“Where do you want me to take you? he asked, talking through the little window in the back of his seat.

Strayte huddled in the mass of straw. It was warm. Compared to the street and the puddles and the station house, it was comfortable. He settled in, curling up on the straw. The driver talked incessantly as if the one sided conversation were a kind of therapy. “The rules say I should take you to the city hospital. No problem except the hospital’s awful. But CTTL won’t let you in unless you have some insurance and they check at the door. Do you have any insurance?”

Strayte did not say a word.

“Of course, if you had insurance the police wouldn’t have dealt you out to me. CTTL wouldn’t let you in unless you had your card on you or unless you were with someone who had a card or unless maybe you had a Rolex. You have a Rolex? No, I didn’t think so.”

“I like this job,” he continued. “Sometimes crazy people are so lucid, not like they are crazy at all. I mean they are crazy but it’s as if they put on a pair of mirrored sun glasses that had the shiny surface on the inside. They say such interesting things, things you never hear anywhere else. I’m making a collection of interesting sayings. I think I can publish it.”

Strayte could not contain himself. “Darkness travels at the speed of light,” he croaked.

Poepple Schwartz was delighted. “That’s wonderful.” He jammed on the brakes and pulled the wagon to the side of the road. “You know that’s really very nice. Do you know any others?”

Strayte sat up. Riding in the horse wagon over the bumpy road, the smell of hay, the stream of consciousness from the driver began to force reality back into the balloon of emptiness that filled his mind. The events of the afternoon and evening began to pull themselves together into something that had a shape and form. They were like individual frames of a home movie taken over the years at family gatherings and viewed in one sitting years later when divorce and death and growing older had changed life completely.

On the screen in his head he observed someone talking to Superman but he was watching the act of a crazy man with the eyes of someone who was rapidly going sane, only with the punishing realization that he was looking at himself. The shame and embarrassment was overwhelming. He thought of the way the thing would be talked about in the home of policewoman who seemed to recognize him. Going crazy was bad enough, but going crazy publicly was embarrassing.

“All of us are crazy but some of us wear our straight jackets only on formal occasions,” he mumbled. Poepple Schwartz jumped up and down on his seat shouting “wonderful, wonderful,” he scribbled it down in the book beside him on the seat.

“Do you remember your name?”

“Strayte,” Strayte croaked.

“Straight, that’s a intelligent, meaningful name. Well Straight, if I publish a book I’ll send you a copy. Who were you talking to back there?” he asked, suddenly changing the topic. “Was it,” he ventured his educated guess, “Superman?”

Strayte wondered how the man knew. “Did you see…,” he started to say then stopped. The van driver had seen nothing. It was a little logic mixed with experience. The man who was driving the horse wagon, taking him to some lunatic asylum, had applied logic. The idea was as cold a shock to his mind as the illusion of Superman had been. “How did you figure it out,” he asked, genuinely curious.

“I’ll take you to Vermeers,” he answered, refusing to reveal his secret. “It’s late enough I can leave you at the door if no one is there and someone will take you in. Their staff is low so you might have to sit a while, but they’ll take you in and it’s not a bad place for a lunatic asylum.” He started the wagon and made a sweeping U turn. “It’s better than the city hospital and it’s a little out of town. Like being in the country. They’ll know that you’re crazy and that I left you there. It’s the least I can do for the two corkscrews you gave me.”

Strayte was getting cold. The holes in the fur coat let in the cool air. His underwear was wet and muddy and the chill of the damp street was creeping over his body and soaking into his skin. “Blanket. You don’t happen to have a blanket around?” he asked. The driver turned around and looked at him through the little window.

“It so happens I do. It’s in the box marked oats. It’s clean too. It’s not a whole blanket but it will cover you.”

Strayte retrieved the blanket. On its side was printed “Sender Stables; Gentle horses for the beginning horse person.” He drew it over the coat and curled up in a ball.

He desperately wanted peace. There was not going to be any peace, he told himself. ‘I’m in for it,’ he thought. He was fucked. He had done it to himself.

“You ever see Vermeers?” the driver yelled through the window. “We’re coming up around it now. It’s a monster. There are three entrances. We got to make a long pass to get to the driveway that leads to the ward.”

Strayte pulled himself to a sitting position and looked out through the wired glass. In the semi darkness he could see a gargantuan building loom up on the right. The outside was coarse, a brick layer that had peeled in spots. Ivy grew in random splotches. He made out a banner flying from the crown of a turret but before he could focus on it, the top of the building was yanked from his view to be replaced by trees on both sides of a long curving driveway.

The thought of spending even a little time there accelerated the hold of sanity on him. “Look I feel fine now,” he gurgled weakly to the driver. “You think you could take me home? Perhaps let me off at a bus stop.”

“Why?” the driver answered cheerfully. “You’re better off here. They’ll give you a few days rest. You could use the rest. I could stop and let you out and you could find your way home half naked, maybe,” he explained, “but I’d have to report that you escaped and they would treat you like a criminal and then you would be in even more shit. The guy in charge is decent. His name is Heirath. He isn’t even a shrink. Stay away from the young psychiatrist though, he’s a bad one. Its not hard, he’s almost never there. The head nurse is okay. They’ll only keep you a few days anyway,” he assured Strayte. “The only thing is most of the patients are really crazy,” he whispered conspiratorially.

Strayte stopped listening to him after the first few words. No was no, no matter why. He slipped down to the floor again. He was in for it. As bad as things were, they were going to get worse. He pulled the blanket closer. As he stared upward he saw the figure of Superman bending so he would fit in the wagon.

“Well you’re not in good shape,” Superman said, shaking his head slowly, like a pendulum. “If at first you don’t succeed. I know it was a little rough. Would you like to try again, I mean to fly?”

Strayte wiped off his thumb and prepared to put it in his mouth.

“Perhaps we could try a different style of flying. Its not so exciting, but its flying. It’s called small flying,” Superman continued. “First you make yourself…” He noticed Strayte’s thumb almost in his mouth. “Oh don’t be such a baby. You’re not going to suck your thumb are you? You weren’t thinking of sucking your thumb?” He puckered his own lips disapprovingly. “That’s an infantile way of trying to solve a problem. Well a set of problems.” He started to enumerate Strayte’s problems. “There’s Marsha of course and Dean Grundle and the book.” Strayte squeaked. “You didn’t forget about the un-publishable book, did you? That was a piece of work, that book. No one would publish until you found…”

“Gunmans Press Inc.,” Strayte hissed.

“Gunmans, yes, Gunmans Press Inc. agreed to publish it and then they were bought out by a conglomerate who canceled the series. So much for the book. Then there’s the disciplinary hearings and suspension and tenure down the tubes. No promotion, that’s for sure. Small flying might be another way out, if you want to try,” he finished invitingly.

Strayte rested his thumb on his lips.

Superman took the silence as an announcement of Strayte’s willingness to try again. “First you make yourself very very small,” he continued. He looked at Strayte. “I guess you’ve already done that haven’t you. Can you make yourself smaller. Not by much, I guess,” he said talking to himself.

‘He is lost in his instructions,’ Strayte thought, ‘lost in the immensity of himself. A fucking comic book creature. I’ve been accompanied into madness by a fucking comic book character.’

Superman drew himself to full height, banging against the roof of the horse van. He continued his instructions. “After you make yourself the tiniest you can make yourself, you, you, you…fart. You take off like a V2 rocket.” He broke into gales of laughter.

“I’m really up shits creek,” Strayte said out loud and let his thumb slip gently into his mouth.

Poepple Schwartz circled the hospital and pulled in past an iron gate that was open and stopped. “O.K here we are. Vermeers.”

He helped Strayte out of the horse trailer. “Watch the step. It’s not bad for horses but it’s a killer for humans,”he said and laughed at his little joke. They went through a big metal door that was unlocked.

They entered a large hall that looked like the entrance of court house. It was lit by a chandelier in which half of the bulbs were burnt out. A typewriter on large oak desk and a large marble bench were guarded by a filing cabinet.

“Sit there for a minute,” the driver said and looked around. He yelled. “Harvey, Nurse G. I guess they’re watching television or something,” he said and walked over to the desk, pulled the chair out and sat down. He rummaged around for a piece of paper which he inserted into the typewriter.

“What’s your first name?

“Nicholas.”

“He typed Nicholas. Do you spell Strayte like the line?” he asked.

“S T R A Y T E, Nicholas Strayte.”

“You happen to know the date, Nick Strayte?”

“25th of April.”

Poepple looked at his watch. 8.37,p.m. ‘Receipt for one crazy patient,’ he typed.

“Would you sign it?” he asked Strayte, handing him the paper and a pen. “If there’s trouble I don’t want to seem like I forged the name.”

Strayte obliged.

“Thanks a lot,” the driver of the horse van said. He eyed the blanket and the coat that Strayte had heaped on himself like a homeless man. Strayte growled.

“Shit,” Poepple Schwartz said. “When someone comes, tell them the coat belongs to the police and blanket belongs to Doppler Universal. Tell them to put them away for me. I’m sure someone will come soon,” he said and fled though the door. “Goodby,” he yelled. “Good luck.”

Chapter 5

The future delivers less than it promises but more than we can handle

Dr. John Heirath heard the noise in the corridor and he got up quietly, and closed the door quietly, and sat back down in his chair quietly. He had come for peace and quiet and been promised peace and quiet but he hardly ever got any. Even when it was quiet and peaceful he knew it was just a tease, that it was just chaos, dressed up in a disguise, waiting to lull him into relaxing, so it could leap out and overwhelm him. It was the one thing he had learned in the two years he had spent at Vermeers.

He sat quietly in his chair and rocked back and forth for a while as he reviewed his career as a physician. It did not come to much.

He had stood by as a non combatant as science and the machines assaulted medicine; He had observed impassively as the government and the bureaucracy marched in and conquered the profession with their forms and schedules; He had spied the insurance companies and the malpractice lawyers slip in behind them and take over and had stayed hidden. He had looked on as medicine surrendered and became a host on which industries fed like parasites.

He had merely observed as the purposefullness drained out, drop by drop until it left only a arid, empty well paying job whose goal was restoring the body to its usual state of disrepair by driving illness and disease away—anyway it could that did not cause malpractice suits—and had good vacations. Medicine had changed. He had seen it. He should have gone blind like Oedipus. He had been a witness if anyone needed a witness. But like Oedipus he was not only a victim; he had perpetrated the crime.

His defense was that he had only wanted to survive. He was a good doctor. He had not made people a sicker than they usually were. But it was not enough. The limitations of his profession had been rubbed in his face twice, smeared on a rag of pointlessness and indiscriminate death. He had had enough.

For the first 5 years of his professional life he thought of himself as a physician. For the next ten years as a doctor. For the last five years he thought of himself as specialist, a liver man. When he came to Vermeers he had given up pretense. He thought of himself as a corpse to be, a pre-suicide.

His mother died when he was six. His father raised him with the help of his aunt. When he was a sophomore in college his father came down with an illness that confused and mystified his doctors. John Heirath became a physician so he could cure him. He never did. His father was dying slowly but faster than his son could learn how to heal him. He gave him a chance, waiting until the month his son became a doctor, to lapse into a coma and die.

By the time he graduated medical school, Dr.John Heirath’s reason for becoming a doctor had disappeared leaving him with pile of debt that overshadowed his loss of faith in his chosen profession.

Without enough money to start a practice of his own he came back to Monrow and got a job in the local city hospital as a emergency room physician. The job was debilitating but it taught him more about the body than he learned in medical school.

He saw bodies mashed in the most horrible way, shredded by bullets, minced by knives, gouged by rocks and shovels still fiercely resist the needle he was trying to sink under the flesh an eighth of an inch to put antibiotics into them. He had pumped out stomachs and pounded on hearts. He had reached into throats and yanked out tools and toys and bottles of pills. It taught him at lot about people. But in the end it became to much to take.

When he paid off his debts he quit and took a over the practice of a well to do doctor who decided he needed a years vacation. The practice flourished on middle aged women who only came in when they read about some new disease in the Readers Digest or Cosmo. They knew more about new exotic diseases than he did. They drove him crazy until he took out subscriptions to the magazines they read. When a new issue arrived at the office he would put aside time to read up about the month’s fashionable diseases. After a while they thought he was a magician.

By the time the physician he was replacing came back, tanned and rested, John Heirath had lost his taste for the general practice of medicine. He spent a month talking to other doctors trying to figure out what kind of doctoring would satisfy him.

After a month was over and he still had not found an alternative that would satisfy him, he went to work for a private health group formed by a group of progressive doctors. A medical time and motion study showed that, done properly, a visit to a physician should take no more than twelve minutes and net $24.45. He had a quota of patients every day who, because the practice prided itself on quality care, were allotted twelve and a half minutes.

After that he did a stint with a local HMO. He spent most of his time filling out forms. What you could do and what you could depended on the insurance. He spent half of his time trying to figure out what needed to be done to help the patient and half of his time trying to figure out what the insurance would pay for. After a while it became impossible to figure out the indirection.

The only thing that salvaged the two years he spent struggling with the forms was that he met his wife there. She was a nurse and she nursed him and kept him sane. She was so old fashioned that he thought she was from a different planet. She wasn’t ambitious and she was happy with whatever he brought home. She believed a family was the highest reward you could get for enduring the world.

While he was agonizing over his destiny, she raised three kids and worked part time in a clinic near the house. His children were the healthiest children around. They never needed his ministrations. Over their lifetime they had needed a doctor twice. They hardly knew what he really did for a living.

When the last of the children entered high school she went back to work full time and he went back to learn more medicine.

Out of desperation he talked himself into believing that the reason he was not happy in medicine was that he was not a specialist. He thought that if he could get know one human part thoroughly, he would be able to grasp the essence of people through the part, that if he narrowed his focus everything would become clear to him. He wanted the heart but settled for the liver.

The program that the local training hospital had was in internal medicine. They took him in and exploited him. It took him three years to become ‘a liver man’ and set up a private practice and for a while he was happy. What he was doing made sense to him. But after a few years his unhappiness returned to him. He realized he never saw people any more, only brutes who mistreated and abused their livers.

When he caught himself starting to think seriously about how you could get the livers out of these clods and let them live on their own, he realized that he was close to going really mad. About the same time he recognized that he had become an appendage to machines, machines that tested, machines that pumped that pulled, that peered. Instead of gaining insight and a sense of perspective he had lost sight of people completely.

The year the last of his children got married he insisted that he and his wife take a vacation. They hadn’t had one in years. The kids were on their own. His oldest son was a surfer in california, His middle child, a daughter, was an urban anthropologist doing field work somewhere in N.Y.C. His youngest daughter had just married an accountant and moved to Canada to teach school so they could ski.

So he and his wife went on a world tour. It was a memorable trip. The day they got back she walked down to the supermarket to buy something for dinner and was hit by a drunk driver. Most of her was just grazed but something, a loose ornament on one of the fenders, went through her liver. Of course it had to be her liver. He held her in his arms. He could feel what was happening to her liver, how it was dying first and dragging her down with it.

While she was laying there she looked up. “I wish you had been priest,” she said.

He didn’t understand. “You’re jewish,” he reminded her. He thought she was delirious. “A rabbi then. But priests do dying much better.”

“I’m only a doctor,” he said.

“I know,” she said quietly, “I forgive you.” Then she died. She died in his arms and there was nothing he could do. He never forgave himself, for not being a priest, for not becoming a cardiologist, it made no different for what. The point of it was that she was dead and he was paralyzed, unable to make a simple decision like morphine or barbiturates.

He went back to his practice. The flood of patients was still there but it made no sense. Then he got hit with a malpractice suit. A semi-alcoholic executive had come in with a corroded liver. After an extensive series of tests he recommended and performed a procedure. He told his patient that he would have to stop drinking, just stop, totally and completely. The executive tried for a while. He really tried. But then he went back to his diet of bourbon and beer again and suffered renal failure. His wife brought a suit saying he had botched the procedure and caused her husbands death.

He insisted the insurance company fight the case. They did, but after he won, they doubled his rates. John Heirath threw in the towel. He started winding down his practice and thinking about how he could end his life. He told his wife that he was coming soon. But while life had become meaningless he could not decide between barbiturates or morphine.

What saved him from suicide was a book he stumbled on called Pre-suicide: A Way Out. He had picked the book up on his way to the bathroom. It was the selection of a book club that targeted physicians. He needed something to read, something that wouldn’t not tax him too much. It was a fateful crap. It solved his problem.

After reading the first chapter he had a solution to his dilemma. Suicide presented him with a choice he was not capable of making. Instead of committing suicide he would pre-suicide. He would look for some job that would be the equivalent of suicide so that after a few years he could really commit suicide because he would have loosened the one string that held him close to life, not the will to live but the inability to die.

‘After you pre-suicide, suicide isn’t an action you take, it’s an undersight.’ He hadn’t quite understood what the writer of the book meant but the idea of pre-suicide gave him a way out. He told his wife she would have to wait a while.

Two openings were immediately available that seemed to fit his requirements. One was as a physician at a small college woman’s college. He concluded after not much thought about it, that pre-suiciding in the midst of so many healthy eighteen-year olds would distract him. The other job was for an assistant medical officer in a lunatic asylum. The hospital had an administrator. It also had a chief medical officer. What they needed was someone to patch cuts and bruises and fill out forms. It was just what he wanted. They weren’t willing to hire his vitae, they wanted an interview. They wanted to see him and see him in action.

As the first part of his interview he treated two patients, put mercurochrome on a butterfly bite for the first and cured a case of imaginary syphilis with an imaginary magic bullet for the second. As he prepared the imaginary injection the patient complained about the man from whom she had gotten the imaginary disease. “He was a real prick,” she complained, “but he said he had never done it before. Maybe I didn’t get it from him,” she suggested. “Can you get syphilis from turtles? I only did it once with a turtle,” she said, “really only half a time. The guy who sold him to me said the turtle was a virgin too, but you can’t trust turtles can you.”

The chief medical officer, whose name was Verschlacht, was also the hospital’s chief psychiatrist. He was a round, hairy man with ears that curled almost shut. “I really liked the way you handled that last patient,” he said. “Excellent, really excellent. It is a mad house you really can’t escape that. But you might fit in fine. You adjust fast.”

John Heirath smiled.

“I would have just yelled at her,” the chief medical officer said. “If you yell loudly, they go away,” he exclaimed. “You made it look real. I’m sure she’ll be back,” he said in a not entirely complementary way. “You should go see the administrator now.” The first part of his interview was over.

The second part of the interview was with the administrator, Harry Demuth, a thin, energetic, fortyish man who spent most of his time practicing putting in a space outside his office window. A patient with a quick, bouncy walk retrieved his golf balls. He chased the small spheres energetically dropping to all fours when he found the ball and sucking it into his mouth after which he returned languidly to the Doctor’s tee and disgorged it like a frog depositing her young in a stream.

“It doesn’t bother you,” Heirath asked quietly.

Harvey Demuth didn’t understand what he was referring to. “Oh. Oh, that,” he finally said. “I tried to teach him to wipe the ball off after he spits it out but he’s completely schizo so I gave up. It’s when he swallows them that I get angry.” He glared at the patient whose name was Gregory. “We don’t do that anymore do we Gregory,” he said. Gregory whose cheek bulged smiled and swallowed.

The administrator offered him the job on the spot. Heirath waited to accept until after he had seen the patients. “I’ll take it,” he told the administrator enthusiastically after he was taken on a tour through the ward. The patients were the healthiest lot of people he had seen in twenty years of practicing medicine. He was on easy street. His pre-suicide was on its way.

“How do you like it?” the administrator asked him after his first day on the job.

“It’s really fine. A lot of work though. I’m not sure I’m up to it.” He had seen two patients all day, exactly the two he had seen on the day of his interview.

“I know what you mean,” the administrator said. “I’m sure you will do just fine. By the way, could you look at my lower back. I’ve got a ferocious pain that just won’t go away.”

“You’re not a inmate,” Heirath said, “who do I bill?”

“Don’t bill anyone just look at my back,” the administrator yelled through the neck of the sweater he was removing.

Dr. Heirath froze. “If something happens,” he asked, “how do I explain our relationship. I mean if you fall and break your neck under the stethoscope and the insurance company calls me up because you’ve started a law suit, what do I say.”

“Don’t say anything. I’m the administrator, for Gods sake, why would I sue?”

“I’ve been sued before. It’s not fun. Can you sign a release, any piece of paper would do.”

“Where’s the paper?”

He looked around for a piece of paper. “Use this.” He ripped of a piece of paper toweling.

“I can’t sign this,” the administrator screamed.

“Why not,” Heirath asked.

“Why do you want me to sign a blank piece of paper?” the administrator asked, suddenly suspicious.

“In case you sue me.”

The administrator became furious. He rumpled the paper and threw it on the ground and stamped on it, smashing it until something snapped in his back with an audible crack. He fell on the floor writhing in pain. “I’ll sue you,” he screamed

“I knew it,” John Heirath said, “I knew it.”

“Wait,” the thin bony man said as he pulled himself up. “I didn’t really mean that. Of course I won’t sue. In fact, the pain has gone away,” he said, writhing in pain. “You’re a miracle worker Heirath,” he squealed as he hobbled from the office.

A week later John Heirath received papers from the law firm of Peat, Peters and Peterson. “We are preparing to initiate a lawsuit for malpractice on behalf of our client, Harry Demuth,” it began. It ended asking for the names of his secondary insurers.

What kept him from an excruciating encounter with the law again, was the international conference on the management of lunatic asylums that began a week later in Madrid

Two days after he accepted the job, the chief medical officer called him on the phone. “Heirath, this is Verschlacht. I’m promoting you to acting chief medical officer. “I’m quitting,” he said. “I’ve just taken the job as chief medical officer at CTTL. In the absence of a full time psychiatrist on the staff that also makes you acting chief psychiatrist. How does it feel to have a new specialty?” he asked, and hung up before Heirath could answer.

A day after that the administrator called him in to his office.

“Well, John I’ve got some great news, really great news.”

“You’re not going to press the lawsuit,” Heirath said hopefully.

“Oh, forget about that,” the administrator said, “it was just a spur of the moment thing.”

“That’s great news,” the new acting chief medical officer said.

“That’s not the great news,” Harvey Demuth declared, “you are going to be acting administrator for a while, that’s the great news. I’ll be going off for a while.”

“Going off where?” was all Dr. Heirath could get out.

“Where what?”

“Where are you going?”

“Madrid. There’s an international meeting of administrators of lunatic asylums and a tour of mad houses.”

“When will you be back?”

“Hard to say exactly. Not to long though. I’ve hired a local psychiatrist, a younger man to handle the psychiatry temporarily. He’ll be assistant chief psychiatrist. You’ll be formally in charge, of course, acting chief medical officer and acting chief psychiatrist and acting administrator, but I expect he’ll handle most of the hard work. He’s coming over to meet you. Think of him as your assistant, John.”

There was a knock on the door.

“I expect that’s him now.” It was like a well timed vaudeville skit.

Dr. Peter Triff walked in the door as if he knew exactly what he was going to do when he got where he was going.

“Glad to meet you, Dr.…”

“Heirath.”

“Glad we’ll be working together,” and his beeper went off.

He pulled out the device and looked at the digits on the screen. “Hm,” he said. He reached inside his coat and pulled out another machine to which he connected to the beeper. The machine hummed gently then flashed a message on its screen. “Hm,” he said and reached inside his coat and pulled out a cellular telephone which he connected to the machine that was connected to the beeper. “It dials the number that beeped you automatically, then it plays a recorded message or you can talk directly. You can hear who wants to talk to you,” he explained. “Korean, I got it in Seoul. Not available here. The Japs don’t have anything like it.” He put the heap of piggy backed devices on the table to be admired. The machinery hummed and buzzed before a female voice spilled into the room saying, “Peter, Peter, I’m waiting Peter.”

“Ill be right there,” he yelled in the direction of the pile of machinery. “Emergency,” he said to Heirath, poking at the off button and gathering the devices up and leaving without saying another word.

“Well I’m off too,” the administrator said. “I’ll see you in a little while,”

That was two years ago, John Heirath thought. He sat in his chair and rocked back and forth and then he got up. He waited for a moment listening at the door for more noise in the corridor. He could not quite decide whether what he heard was shuffling and moving or just the echoes that seemed to fill Vermeers at night

For two years he had gotten a weekly letter from the administrator who prolonged his trip visiting facilities and attended international meetings. The letter always contained a description of the last meeting he had attended and his itinerary for the coming week or month. He also enclosed a little flag which Heirath was to put up on the map of the world that the administrator had left in his office so that the acting administrator could follow the progress of his trip. The flags came in two flavors, green and purple. The green flag meant that the administrator had attending a meeting or conference at a place. The purple flag meant that he had extended an invitation to a group of local psychiatrists who could be expected to show up at Vermeers at any time. The line of flags started in Madrid, curled around Europe, marauded around South East Asia and was poised to leap into China. Dr. Heirath searched for two years for a pattern that would let him anticipate and fortify himself for the seemingly random eruption of visiting psychiatrists but a sequence had eluded him.

The administrator also included in each letter a reminder that if there was trouble he should be contacted immediately but Heirath’s telegrams insisting that he come back immediately never appeared to reach him. The list of international meeting, conventions and exhibitions was endless. When one year’s cycle ended a second began and special convocations also appeared regularly. Peter Triff, the young psychiatrist who was supposed to be his assistant, never managed to spend more than fifteen minutes in the hospital before his beeper exploded. It was always an emergency. So the business of running every aspect of the hospital had devolved on him.

“I’m quitting,” he told Martin Mash who ran the board of the foundation that supported the hospital.

“You can’t quit now, it’s a crisis. We really need you, now. Quit next week, maybe. There’s money problem.”

There were always money problems. Money problems were the least of John Heirath’s problems. Medical problems were the second least. His judgement that the patients were health was correct. But they were insane, every one of them except perhaps the black man who looked after the artist and the emaciated patient with the crew cut who was always on the phone. His training and experience had not prepared him to deal with, let alone treat their insanity.

The first year he spent whatever free time he had reading psychiatric textbooks but it didn’t seem to help. The second year he spent whatever free time he had reading psychiatric journals. It did not help. Either he had missed some secret trove of psychiatric wisdom or the particular way in which the patients at Vermeers were insane were a complete mystery to the psychiatric establishment.

“They’re not crazy in typical ways,” he had complained to Triff, the young assistant psychiatrist, on one of the mornings when the young doctor popped up unexpectedly a few minutes earlier than usual. They stood for a moment expecting his beeper to explode.

“That’s why they’re crazy, the young psychiatrist said, checking that his beeper was still working. He started to give the older man a quick course in his personal psychiatric diagnostic categories. “They are not diagnostically crazy because they don’t fall into one of those diagnostic categories of APA III. That leaves, let’s say, certifiably crazy. Are they…?” His beeper went off. “Sorry about that, it’s an emergency,” he said, looking at the numbers on the little screen in the beeper. “Look, one of these days I’ll explain to you all the diagnostic categories I use. Not today, though,” he said and took off.

Besides being assistant psychiatrist at Vermeers Peter Triff had a private practice and was on the staff of CTTL where he specialized in bankers and brokers who had cracked under stress. He also had a mistress, a wife and three children, and a broker who never traded more than fifteen shares of any stock without a conference. His mistress called every day at 9:15, earlier when he had spent the night at home, his wife called when the stores at the mall opened, his broker called whenever the market moved up or down an eighth of a point and his patients at CTTL called whenever they had a tip they thought he could use or their medication wore off. Heirath had never seen Peter Triff at Vermeers for more than twelve minutes at a time.

Which was just as well because the young psychiatrist drove patients crazy when he reevaluated them which he was scheduled to do weekly, but did in bits and pieces over a month—because of the beeper.

“You should get an assistant,” he suggested to Heirath one week just before his beeper exploded.

Heirath snarled at him. “You are my assistant.”

“I mean a real assistant,” Petter Triff said seriously.”What happens when your beeper goes off? He stared at Heirath puzzled, noticing for the first time the acting administrator did not have a beeper.

“Well, you should get an assistant anyway,” and took off, as his beeper sounded leaving a naked patient leaning against the wall continuing to count backward, “994 993…”

Dr. Heirath tiptoed to the door again. The outside was quiet. He listened hard. Quiet. He was going to go to his room for a little peace and quiet before he fell into what was usually a trouble sleep. He opened the door and slipped on his coat and shuffled out.

On the marble bench, buried under a fur coat and a blanket was Jossef the homeless man who snuck into the hospital to spend nights. Heirath argued with himself whether he should throw him out. “Maybe I…maybe I should let him sleep in tonight.” Then he remembered that if he let him spend the night, it was nearly impossible to get him out the next day because the patients took his side.

Dr. Heirath approached the sleeping figure. “O.K., Joseff,” he yelled, “out you go.” A head came up, wrapped in part of a blanket that said ‘Sender Stables; Gentle Horses for the Beginning Horse Person.’ The head was not Joseff’s.

“Who are you?” he asked the wobbly man on the bench.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Dr. Heirath, the acting administrator and acting chief medical officer and acting chief psychiatrist of Vermeers.”

“I’m Nick Strayte. I was crazy for a while this evening, but I’m better now.”

John Heirath stared at the man in the blanket. Peace and quiet had dodged him again.

Chapter 6

There are games you can’t win but can’t lose either. These are the games without rules that are the most difficult to play.

Joseff Haggle wasn’t always homeless, it just seemed that way because he couldn’t remember anything that happened before the time he became a homeless man.

Other homeless people he knew were different. Some could only remember what life was like before they became homeless people because they forgot all of what happened after they became homeless.

It didn’t matter though, really whether you gathered all of the memories that accumulated before you got to be homeless and threw them away, or got to be homeless and discarded every recollection afterward before they could accumulate and solidify and become memories. Homeless was homeless. It was a great divide, a great punctuation of a person’s life. He didn’t know anyone whose memory wasn’t affected by becoming homeless. He knew this. But when he thought about it, he got confused.

None of the homeless people he hung around with, could understand why he was so bothered by what he could and couldn’t remember. “When one day is like the next what use you got for memory,” his friend Benny would say. “You think to much. You’re an intellectual.” All of the homeless people thought of Joe Haggle as an intellectual and a philosopher. Because he was an intellectual and a philosopher they did not trust him but they would come to him with their problems and questions.

“How come when I get blind drunk on Thunderbird,” someone asked him, “I get a hard on, but I never get a hard on when I get blind drunk on Delight?”

“How come the bond market goes up when interest rates go down?”

“How come, some times when it’s cold, my ass is freezing in my cardboard box and other times, when its just as cold, I’m warm as toast?”

This last problem had bothered Joe Haggle also. In fact, Joe Haggle had no idea what the answers to any of these questions were, but since his companions thought he should, he would say something. “Congress,” he would declare sometimes, or “red” or “ bottleshape” or “wind.”

“Who would have thought of that,” they would say. “ You’re a real philosopher, Joe.”

When they weren’t asking him questions, the homeless people Joe Haggle hung out with would sit around telling each other their life stories. If they liked one of the stories they heard they adopted it and told it as their own life story for a while.

Some people resented the fact that their lives sounded better on other people and they stopped telling their real stories and started making up stories which other people adopted as their real stories. But this borrowing of life stories never bothered Joe Haggle. Just the opposite. He felt that when your life appeared as someone else’s story it always seemed more romantic—sadder than when it was your own story.

He had an interesting life story. It impressed him more when he heard another man tell it as his life story one evening.

“I lived in a trailer park, me and my wife and my kid. I had a daughter. It wasn’t a fancy trailer, only an ordinary one. We were saving to buy a fancy one with three rooms not just two, so my daughter wouldn’t have to sleep in the kitchen and wouldn’t have to listen to us humping at night, though we didn’t hump often. “

“My wife and I worked in a factory. I was an assembler. I made a little more than she did but not much more. A woman who was a little retarded use to watch our daughter when we were working. We paid her regular.”

“We made parts that went into machines. I don’t know exactly what the machines that these parts went into did. My job was to put together a lot of little parts from a bin and test the module to see that it was working. A lot of times it didn’t because the parts were no good and I would have to rip it apart and replace the bad parts. I used to complain. “

“‘The parts don’t work,’ I would say to the foreman, and he would complain to the guy who owned the factory, and he would come out cursing and say, ‘Just put the fucking parts together Joe.’ ‘But a lot of times they don’t work,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you get someone to check the parts each time a person finishes one. Then we wouldn’t have so…’”

“‘You want to be boss?’ he would ask. ‘Just put them together Joe,’ he would say ‘The reason you got so many bad parts is that you are too fussy. I’m not sure this is the place for philosophers,’ he would say. I got the message.”

“Then one day the boss comes in and says ‘Listen up everyone I got bad news. The company that makes the things the things you are making go into is cutting down production. Factories are buying jap machines so they’re not selling so many. I’ve got to let some of you go.’ He named a half dozen people. I was one of them. They were all people who were making a little more than the others.”

“Well, my wife was still working but things got tight. We had to stop saving for the new trailer for a while. I went out and started looking for a job but all of the factories were laying off people and I just couldn’t find anything, anything at all so, I stayed home to watch Lisa Ann, our daughter so we didn’t have to pay the retarded woman to watch her. I cooked dinner and shopped. I didn’t like it. It just didn’t seem like it was my kind of work but I did it. We stopped humping because neither of us felt like it too much anymore. Things went like that for a while. They weren’t good but my wife was still bringing in a salary. Then the plant bellied up entirely and she lost her job too.”

“We got confused and upset. First we went all over trying to find jobs again. She got some work cleaning houses but it wasn’t steady and the black people who worked for these people complained about her, mostly that she wasn’t black. After we used up all of the money we had saved for the trailer and things didn’t get any better my wife went and applied for welfare but they wouldn’t give it to her because I was in the house not working.”

“We talked it over. ‘I don’t want you to leave, Joe. Lisa Ann needs a father, and I need a husband. But she needs to eat more than she needs a father steady and I’ll be home to watch her. Maybe you could visit your brother for a while just till things get settled.’ Trouble was of course, I didn’t have no brother. We both knew it.”

“Well I took off. I figured I could go on the road for a while and see what I could see. Maybe there were jobs somewhere else. I traveled around for a while. I panhandled, I stole things when I could find things to steal and sold them. When I got to a town I looked for work but there wasn’t any. I picked fruit for a while, worked one summer and made good money on a construction crew. I sent half of it home but when the winter came we were all laid off and they told us to get out of town. That was when me and this guy I met on the construction crew tried to hold up a liquor store. It wasn’t a big liquor store, only a little one and we didn’t have no real gun only a fake gun but the liquor owner had a real gun and he took it out and shot my partner dead and held me till the police came. I went to prison for two years with time off for good behavior.”

When I got out getting a job was even harder because I was a criminal with a record. I went back to the trailer court. I hadn’t heard from my wife during the time I was in prison even though I got someone to write for me every month or so. ‘Moved,’ the retarded woman said. ‘When,’ I asked and she said ‘sometime, sometime.’ All my letters from prison were piled up in the office. My wife hadn’t left no forwarding address. I took them and threw them away.”

“By that time there were a lot of people who didn’t have any place to stay who were living in cardboard boxes down by the tracks. I got myself a cardboard box and moved in. A soup kitchen had opened so eating wasn’t no problem no more. So here I am,” the person telling the story said.

Joe Haggle recognized the story as his own, told better than he could tell it, sounding more real than it was when he told it because he always added details to his story, like how his daughter looked when he walked out of the trailer for the last time, or the kind of noises his wife made when they humped, which woke up his daughter, which was why they wanted a bigger trailer in the first place. The details always bored the people who were listening to it. Joe Haggle recognized the story as his own story but the trouble was he couldn’t remember back before he got to homeless so he couldn’t be absolutely definitely sure, that it was his story.

Being homeless was confusing. Being homeless was crazy, which is why he wanted to get into the lunatic asylum. Ever since he had started living in his box down by the tracks, his only ambition was to get into Vermeers. It was warm and you could sleep almost anywhere. There was food and television. It was paradise. He thought it would be easy since everyone he met inside the hospital when he managed to sneak in for lunch complained about being there and wanted to get out.

“You want to get into Vermeers? Are you nuts?” Doctor Heirath responded,” the first time the homeless man begged the acting administrator him to let him into the asylum.

“Yes, I’m crazy,” the homeless man said.

“How do you know you’re crazy?” the doctor asked, suddenly suspicious.

“I know I’m crazy because I think crazy things,” Joseff replied.

“You mean like you think you’re thinking crazy things. That’s no basis for diagnosing someone as crazy even if it were true,” John Heirath asserted. “Besides, your diagnosis is worthless.”

“Why?” Joe Haggle asked.

“Because you’re crazy, you just told me so,” Dr. Heirath said, “who ever heard of anyone believing a crazy man’s diagnosis.”

“Let me see if I got it right,” the homeless man muttered. “It’s as if…lets say I tell you I’m lying then you can’t trust me to be telling you the truth because I said I was a liar.”

“Exactly right,” the doctor said.

“And if I’m lying about lying I must be telling you the truth,” Joseph said very slowly, “but if I’m telling you the truth then…”

“Enough,” the doctor said, “enough. You can see why I can’t let you into Vermeers.”

The homeless man’s eyes lit up. “Logic, it’s logic, isn’t it,” he protested. “I read it in a book about catches. It’s not fair to bring logic into an argument in a crazy house. It’s dirty pool.”

“You’re right,” the doctor said. “I don’t have a stomach for logic either. Forget logic. It doesn’t matter. You can’t stay.”

Joseph gave it one more shot. “Everyone here wants to get out. Right”

Doctor Heirath had to agree with him.

“But I want to get in, right,” Joseff pushed his point.

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t that make me crazy.”

“You’re homeless. It makes you sane. It’s warm, there’s food, there’s television. You can sleep anywhere,” the doctor continued.

“Being homeless is crazy,” the homeless man protested.

“But not crazy crazy. I mean it’s crazy from the small point of view, from your point of view and my point of view, but it’s not crazy from the big point of view. From the big point of view a negative balance sheet and bankruptcy is crazy.”

“But I’m still crazy for wanting to get into a mental hospital.”

“O.K. lets assume you’re crazy,” Heirath said, shifting his tack, “I’ll let you in if you can tell me what kind of crazy you are.”

Joseff stopped. “What do you mean?”

“I mean what kind of crazy are you? There are different ways of being crazy. What kind of crazy are you.”

The homeless man shrugged. “I don’t know, “crazy crazy.”

The doctor sighed in relief. If he had said ‘just crazy’ he would have put himself in one of Dr. Triff’s categories and the acting administrator would have had to let him in.

He despised Triff, the smart assed young psychiatrist who was supposedly his assistant, especially when he lectured to him about psychiatry, but he needed a shortcut to get the homeless man off of his back.

“They’re my own diagnostic categories,” Peter Triff said one day between minor burps of his beeper. He took out the little box and shook it. “It may be sick,” he said. “Wait a minute.” He reached into his pockets and took out a machine the acting administrator had never seen. He held the two machines together and listened. “No,” and put the apparatus back in his pocket, and continued.

“It beats the American Psychiatric Association’s system hand down. Theirs is too cluttered up with technicalities. Mine are clear and concise”. He spit out his categories of insanity. “There is diagnostically crazy, certifiably crazy, uncategorically crazy and just crazy. Have I missed any? No, That’s it. I think. No, wait,” he said, “there’s…” The beeper went off. “It’s an emergency. I’ll tell you all of the categories tomorrow,” and disappeared.

Peter Triff’s categories were the only ones Heirath had been able to master even though he had covered a wall in his office with pieces of paper on which he had written all of the categories in the psychiatric manual he had found in the chief medical officers bookcase.

“Crazy crazy is not a diagnostic category,” he informed the homeless man. “Now if you had said….” He stopped. If he gave him one of the categories today he would use it tomorrow. “If you knew what kind of crazy you were, you would have had a shot. If you could tell me what symptoms you had that put you in that category I would admit you right now.”

The homeless man gave up and resigned himself to his cardboard box.

Dr. Heirath enjoyed talking to the homeless man who was as sane as he was. He felt badly about tricking him into thinking his refusal to let him into the hospital was reasonable when it made no sense at all. “Would you like a candy bar. I have a Milky Way here somewhere.” Dr. Heirath rummaged through his pockets and handed the small, dejected homeless man the candy and watched him shuffle off down the long hallway past the typewriter and the marble bench where a different man in a fur coat and blanket was just sitting up.

The doctor looked at Strayte as if he were lying and crazy. “You’re not Joseff?”

“No.”

“You’re one of his friends,” he said definitively.

“Don’t know Joseff.”

“Are you homeless?”

“Not the last time I looked,” Nick Strayte said in a raspy voice.

“You want to get into this hospital?” Dr. Heirath asked suspiciously.

“I wanted to talk to someone about that,” Strayte said, not quite sure what he should say. “I,…I don’t really think…” He stopped. Except for wispy clouds of embarrassment and shame, his mind was clear.

He had had a nervous breakdown. The episode was piercing and painful but except for the chill that racked his body and an ache that was doing a tango in his head, he felt reasonably sane again. He wasn’t sure he could completely trust his recovery. It had come too fast. It might be another trick his mind was playing on him. What convinced him that it was genuine was that he was beginning to think logically again and bits of Sociology were coming back to him.

A piece of one of his lectures drifted into his mind. ‘The first step over the threshold into any organization is the critical step, especially if you don’t want to get into the organization at all. That first step into any organization takes you to the gut of the enterprise, the exact place that is farthest from the entrance. As soon as the smallest part of you crosses the nearly invisible outermost edge of the system you are immediately sucked into its dark center and at the mercy of the demon who lurks there, at the mercy of his logic, which is completely irrational. It is an asymmetrical path. Going one way, in, the bowels of any organization are closest to the entrance. Going out, the bowels of any organization are furthest away from the entrance.’ It was true for prisons, or courts, or schools. If it was true for them it was certainly true for lunatic asylums.

He did not want to be committed to this hospital. But what should he say? If he said that he didn’t want to get into the mental hospital the doctor might think he was sane and let him go home because no sane person wanted to enter a lunatic asylum. On the other hand, if he said he didn’t want to get in, the doctor might see him as a crazy person who hadn’t lost all of his marbles yet and knew that lunatic asylums were not places people, especially crazy people, wanted to be in.

If he said that he did want to get into the hospital, the doctor might see him as insane person who wanted to be cured and open the door. On the other hand he if said he wanted to get in the doctor might see him as a sane person who had a good reason to get into the hospital, like a homeless man. He thought the last alternative was the best tack to take but it meant he would have to build a complete history and rationale on the spot and he was not quite healthy enough for that kind of deception yet.

“This is”—he tried to remember the name—”Vermeers, right. It’s a mental hospital.”

“That’s right,” the doctor responded cautiously, not sure what game the half naked man with the horse blanket was playing.

“Well, I feel pretty good now. I don’t think I really need to be…I mean I think I’m O.K. now.”

Dr. Heirath saw the piece of paper the man was clutching. He took it gently from him and read it. “Oh, I see.” He turned wearily. “Well, I was on my way home but—you don’t have your clothes in the blanket do you?” The man’s nakedness embarrassed him.

Nick Strayte shook out the blanket to show him he did not.

“Come on in to my office,” the doctor said.

“It’s not necessary, really,” Strayte responded as he gathered up the coat and blanket and followed the shuffling doctor into his office leaving a trail of straw behind him. The room was large and softly lit. The doctor switched on the desk lamp.

“Are you hungry? I have a candy bar or two somewhere.” Strayte suddenly felt ravished.

“A candy bar would be fine.”

Dr. Heirath went to a filing cabinet and pulled out two candy bars and an opened bag of popcorn.

Strayte shook his head. “It’s embarrassing.”

“If you don’t want to talk about it it’s O.K., but I’m a doctor “

“So am I, a Ph.D, in Sociology,” Strayte said, “but it’s still embarrassing. I went round the bend for a while this evening. I saw Superman.”

The doctor cocked his head. “Do you see him now?” Strayte looked at him strangely. “No I’m O.K. now.”

The doctor relaxed a bit. “Have you seen him before?”

“When I was a kid occasionally.”

“I mean more recently.”

“A few times.”

The doctor decided the man sitting on his sofa munching the candy bar might be crazy after all.

“The movies. Didn’t you see them?”

The doctor shrugged. “No.”

“Not worth seeing anyway,” Strayte judged.

“How come you saw Superman today?”

Strayte tensed a bit. He looked at the doctor. “My name is Nicholas Strayte.”

“I’m Heirath,” he other man responded, “John Heirath. I’m acting administrator and acting chief medical officer and acting chief psychiatrist of Vermeers.”

Strayte took a bite of the Milky Way. “I flipped out.”

“Want to talk about it.”

“Don’t you want to get home?” Strayte asked.”You were going home. Its late I guess. I wouldn’t want to keep you from getting home.

The doctor interrupted him. “I’m tired but going home is no great shakes. My wife died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She died 4 years ago.”

“I’m still sorry to hear it. A wife is a good thing.”

The doctor seemed to collapse. All of his parts together folded together. “I am tired.”

Strayte recognized the collapse. “That’s what happened to me. I just fell apart. I saw Superman.”

“You said.”

“I went out on the street and wanted to learn to fly. And then I saw Superman. He didn’t help much.”

“No, no one ever does,” the doctor commented. “Why did you want to fly?”

Strayte thought about it. “Are you a psychiatrist?”

The doctor shrugged. “No I’m a liver specialist. I’m acting director of the hospital and acting chief medical officer and acting director of psychiatric services. But my specialty is livers. Why did you want to get away so badly?”

Strayte curled up inside his the coat. “I’m an associate professor…of Sociology.” He found it difficult to talk about himself.

“Its O.K. I’m a doctor.”

“Yes, but you’re not a psychiatrist.”

“What the hell difference does that make. You don’t seem crazy either.”

Strayte thought about it. It made sense.

“I was going to have a book published. The publisher was sold to a conglomerate and canceled the series. I’ve been brought up on charges of sexual harassment. The college suspended me. They took away a grant I’ve been running. I was up for promotion but I’ll probably be fired and sued.”

“Did you do it?”

“What?”

“Sexually harass whoever.”

“Marsha. Her name is Marsha. No. We slept together but…”

“Was she a student of yours?”

“Not when I slept with her, before. But she was a student.”

“Yeah.”

“She seduced me. She was on drugs, she was whoring her way on the side to make tuition. She was very bright. I felt sorry for her. I thought I could do some good.”

“By sleeping with her.”

Strayte’s eyes flashed. “No, most of the time I spent with her we talked about her life.”

“Her father abused her.”

“Yes,” Strayte said, “how did you know?”

Heirath shrugged.

“I got her to stop the drugs. I gave her some money for a while to get her to stop whoring.”

“While you were sleeping with her.”

“No, I never touched her. She was doing well. Then she fell in love with this yoyo. He was in my course. He was flunking. She wanted me to give her the exam.”

“For him.”

“For her I would have done it.”

“But You didn’t.”

“No.”

“When did you sleep with her?”

“She got me a little drunk and then she wondered why I hadn’t made a pass at her.”

“Why hadn’t you?”

“I…I was trying to…”

“Do good.”

“I didn’t think that it would help. She was smart.”

“Noble.”

“No.”

“There were other affairs I had, other students.”

“What happened?”

“She accused me of being queer. Then she said I must be impotent. Then she said it must be because she was ugly. In the end I just slept with her.”

“So.”

“She got pissed that even after I slept with her I wouldn’t give her the exam. She got caught with her boyfriend trying to break into my office. The college was going to expel them. Then suddenly she accused me of raping her. She said they were just trying to teach me a lesson. Instead of expelling her, they suspended me. They are going to start hearings.”

Strayte watched the doctor fighting a loosing battle against his tiredness and suddenly grew suspicious. This mild looking soft spoken man who claimed to be a doctor and the acting administrator could be a patient who was waiting for him to doze off before he went completely berserk and killed him. He dismissed the idea. “Look,” he said, “you’re really tired.”

Dr. Heirath jerked his head up. “It’s O.K.. I have a suggestion,” he said, slurring his words. “It seems to me that you had…seeing Superman was just…” He reached sleepily for large book on his desk and flipped through a few pages. “I’m trying to learn psychiatry,” he explained, “‘a transitory episode.’ You never saw Superman before?”

“We’ve been over this,” Strayte reminded him.

“Yes.” Heirath closed the book. “Why don’t you stay here a few days. The rest will probably do you good and we can submit a bill you won’t pay anything. Do you have insurance?”

Strayte shrugged.

“It doesn’t matter. We submit a form and get reimbursed from the foundation that runs this place. You count as a charity case. We could use the money and breakfast is good. Well, it’s not bad,” he said, his head drooping.

Strayte thought about it. He was as tired as the liver man in front of him. It was insanity to struggle with a cab in a fur coat and a horse blanket. It made sense to lie low for a few days. “Where should I stay tonight?”

Heirath had put his head down on the desk. “Most of the rooms in the corridor to the left are empty. The patients are on an another corridor. The even numbered rooms are used last.” Heirath propped his head up. “I have a pair of hospital whites. We don’t use them around here often. They’re in the closet. You can wear them as pajamas so you don’t have to sleep in a fur coat and a horse blanket. Tomorrow we can find you something more appropriate to wear.” He stopped talking and fell asleep.

Strayte closed the door behind him quietly and heard his foot slap the floor. He had taken the first step he had tried to avoid.

Chapter 7

There is nothing so frustrating as a day that goes back on its promises.

Vermeers was eerily quiet. Nick Strayte wandered down the hall looking for an even numbered room. There was no pattern to the numbering that he could see, room 1 followed room 3a, 33 followed 655. The doors to the first two even numbered rooms were bolted but the third one was unlocked.

He nudged the door open and peered in. The hall light pushed enough illumination through the doorway for him to see the neatly made up bed. The back wall of the room was curtained, and he could distinguish a small dresser and a chair in front of the mirror on the closet.

Tiredness punished him, smacking his legs like a giant hand. He felt wobbly. He struggled into the white uniform that the acting chief psychiatrist had given him and collapsed on the bed. His mind barely registered the low moan that seemed to come from some where behind the back wall of the room.

He found the bed and he invited sleep to come so he could surrender to it, but his mind insisted on picking through the pieces of the day looking for something it could salvage.

The parts of his body fell asleep individually. His feet went first then his arms and his chest. His eyes and ears followed quickly. But his mind stayed awake, lifting up shards of the days events and jiggling them in front of him for his shut eyes to look at.

He watched his flying lesson again, only this time he seemed to be launching himself from an unbearable reality into some unidentifiable space that was neither air nor sleep nor madness. Instead of flopping miserably to the ground he floated, held from escaping the earth by a string tied around his foot and anchored to some invisible, immoveable object. He felt himself moving into the picture becoming the him he was watching.

He squirmed and twisted trying to break free of whatever held him from losing himself in the unsubstantial cottony substance that took the place of atmosphere and sky.

After he stopped struggling, he felt his shackle snap. Untied, he drifted free. He could not tell where he was, what space he moved in, whether he was sane or insane, awake or asleep.

Suddenly he began to rise. He stomach told him he was being pitched upward, boosted by some impalpable updraft that carried him higher and higher in great sweeping motions.

Then, just as suddenly he was falling, a fall through something that provided no resistance and had no bottom.

He yelled out, “no,” “no,” then felt a splash as reality condensed. There was a whooshing sound and he was somewhere which looked very much like the same street from which he had begun his journey to the hospital, the street in front of his house. Superman was beside him.

“In a bit of a pickle,” the Man of Steel said.

“Look,” Strayte started to explain to him, “it was a mistake. I had a bad transitory episode.” He held tightly to the words the doctor at Vermeers had used. “I know so…”

“So what?” Superman said coldly. “What does that have to do with now? I thought you wanted to learn to fly.”

“I went crazy. I was crazy. It was crazy.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that now. You’re dreaming. Sane, sort of, and dreaming.”

“How do I know I’m dreaming?” Strayte asked.

“Pinch yourself,” Superman replied. “Go ahead try it.”

Strayte desperately tried to pinch himself but his skin slipped out from between his fingers.

“See you’re dreaming, not going crazy. That you already did today. No sense in re-running a bad flick.”

“What are you doing here then?”

“Is there a comic book law that says I can only show up in hallucinations? You’re dreaming,” Superman insisted, “relax.”

Strayte felt uncomfortable as if he might go crazy again in a nightmare and get stuck dreaming permanently and never wake up. “Look,” he said. “I don’t think I want to learn to fly. I wanted to learn when…”

“When you went crazy.”

“When I went crazy,” Strayte admitted.

“Well you’re not crazy now are you, even if you are in a madhouse.”

“Only for a few days,” Strayte insisted.

Superman looked skeptical. “You never can tell,” he said.

“Only a few days,” Nick Strayte repeated emphatically.

“I’m glad you think so,” Superman said, not seeming to want to argue the point. He yawned and stood up. “Anyway flying is a useful skill to have. This is the way you fly. Not small flying, that was a joke. I’m sorry about that. I just couldn’t help myself. Super strength does not always mean super self control. Anyway, here is how you fly.” He pulled strayte up easily. “Stand on your toes.”

Strayte had difficulty balancing on his toes. “I really don’t think I want to fly now. I’m tired. I want to sleep.”

Superman wouldn’t hear of it. “Remember Dean Grundle, Marsha, your un-publishable book that might now never get published, your promotion orphaned, your tenure out the window, your grant down the tubes.”

Strayte wobbled furiously as he tried to raise himself on his toes.

“Come on, man,” Superman insisted “on your toes. Stretch and think a good thought.” He stopped. “Well, that didn’t seem to work last time,” he said. “Look, just imagine you are flying.”

“If I’ve never flown, how can I imagine I’m flying?” Strayte wanted to know. “

“Why are you always so difficult, Nick Strayte,” Superman said indulgently. He pretended he was angry. “Just imagine you’re flying, you schmuck, otherwise you’ll never get off the ground.”

Strayte imagined he was flying.

“See, it worked,” Superman exclaimed gleefully. “Look down, you’re flying.”

Strayte looked down. There was a widening gap between his feet and the ground. Then suddenly he was a hundred feet up in the air. He was flying. He shifted a little and darted off to the right.

“Where’s the college?” he asked Superman. The Man of Steel was at his side, lolling and looking a little bored.

“It’s down there,” he pointed down to his left.

Strayte slid off in that direction and hovered over the school. It looked tiny, like the model that was in Grundle’s office. He scanned the buildings searching for the model and found Dean Grundle’s office. He realized that not only was he flying but he could see through walls. The model was there and so was Dean Grundle fucking someone on the couch in his office. It was hard to make out the woman under the dean because she was so small but he thought he recognized the face. He ratcheted up his vision. It was Marsha. Dean Grundle was working late in his office fucking Marsha. He turned to position himself over the dean’s office.

“Don’t even think of it,” Superman ordered sternly. Strayte abandoned the thought. “Flying and being able to see through walls have their down side,” Superman said quietly. “After a while you develop a super insensitivity to deal with it but it takes time.”

“Where’s Vermeers?”

“Over there,” Superman pointed in the opposite direction.

With a toss of his head Strayte moved in that direction.

Vermeers was a single gigantic structure shaped like an E. Three distinct, driveways broke off from the road in front of the asylum each curling in a gentle tree shaded arc to a different wing of the building.

Vermeers was four times as large as the university complex. There was a meadow filling the space around the E in which he saw crickets and animals. A flag was flying from the top of the building. He looked down through the roof of the building. “Look,” he said, “there I am in a bed.” He stared at himself. He looked tranquil and serene. He was resting. Watching himself asleep he could tell he felt good, at peace.

Somewhere off to his left he heard Superman. “No,” he was yelling, “No.” Strayte paid no attention to him. He listened the voice in his head that asked why in the hell anyone who was resting so peacefully would want to fly.

“Shit,” Nick Strayte heard Superman say and found himself plummeting. It was terrifying. The earth was a vacuum sucking him towards it. The air provided no resistance. He was an a bubble of emptiness hurling toward emptiness. He was falling from an fearful height and felt an enormous acceleration. He hadn’t quite mastered flying but it looked like he was going to master dying.

He snapped up to a sitting position up on the bed, covered with sweat that felt like the grime and dirt he had been covered with on his first attempt to learn to fly. Superman was gone but the wall behind him was moaning gently. The room was flooded with light and someone was yelling at him. He was not certain he was either really awake or really sane but either way he felt lousy.

Chapter 8

If you can’t come to terms with reality, you have the wrong terms.

Peter Triff had big ideas but only a rudimentary sense of reality. He had had big ideas ever since he was a small child. When he was eight, he tried to get his mother to divorce his father and marry a man with a lot of money. He even had someone in mind for her, a businessman who had spoken at a meeting of the young achiever’s club. The man was intelligent, handsome, divorced and very very rich. He was looking for a wife.

It was not that he disliked his father. Just the opposite. He thought he was an O.K. guy. It was just that he was not quite suitable as his father.

When his mother insisted on staying married to his father, he took it as evidence that she was a loser and started on his father, pointing out his mothers faults, large and small, and suggesting he was too good for her. He did not really try to convince his father that a change of wives was a smart move until he met someone he thought would make a good mother, a rich woman who had also given a talk to the young achievers club and who took a particular interest in him. But by that time his father, who was quicker than Peter had given him credit for being, had gotten the idea and left his mother and taken up with a fluzzy who was poorer than he was.

When Peter Triff’s father divorced his mother and married the floozy, Peter Triff learned the first of the two lessons he would learn in his lifetime about the world. It was that he didn’t have a clue about what went on in the heads of real people. He learned the second lesson at about the same time. It was that most people, even people close to you, didn’t have brains enough to take good advice. As part of the divorce settlement, Peter Triff went to live with his father.

After the divorce, his mother remembered the rich man Peter had introduced her to. They were married just after his father took his fluzzy and Peter to California and Peter hardly ever saw her again. The loss of his mother bothered Peter Triff more than he imagined. She never sent him more than a card on his birthday and forgot him at Christmas time entirely.

The trollop his father married managed to get pregnant twice quickly and in rapid succession gave birth to two girls. After his step sisters were born, his father ignored him with an intensity Peter Triff did not conceive his father possessed.

As a child, people around him seemed to think of him as greedy, rude and ambitious. Determined was the way he thought about himself. He had set his sights on becoming successful very quickly. He had big ideas. He was smart. He was ambitious, rude, greedy and determined. What he felt he lacked was a dream.

His earliest ambition was to be a rich lawyer. His father was a lawyer but was as poor as a lawyer could be because he insisted on handling a lot of impoverished clients who could only pay small fees. He was the worst possible role model a growing boy could have. Most of his fathers friends were rich lawyers who sent him clients only when they were poor and could not afford their engorged charges. His father was happy making out wills and defending unemployed house owners against the bank foreclosures. Everyone in the achievers club who was anyone looked down on his father. Peter himself was embarrassed by him and took their side when some achiever from a poor family defended him as having a heart and soul.

Peter Triff’s ambitions shifted during adolescence when he got sick and his father took him to a new doctor in town, a specialist. After his father paid the doctor a lot of money he treated Peter for the disease he had quietly and without making the report the law required. The doctor swiftly and competently took care of a complication that arose afterward, also for a lot of money. After these two encounters Peter’s ambition changed. He began to think seriously about becoming a doctor.

The specialist took a liking to him, more so after young Peter ran into him one day in a place the doctor shouldn’t have been, with someone one he should not have been with, doing something he shouldn’t have been doing.

Peter recognized the girl. She was a high school student, a classmate of his, and he could not figure out what the doctor saw in her. She was pretty of course, and she had a rugged and vigorous sense of innocence about her, but she had no ambition in the world as far as he could see and she did it with guys who had no money to speak of.

“It will be our little secret,” the doctor said, when Peter caught him. “I am really interested in a bright young man with a future like yourself. Come to see me. We’ll talk about things,” and he gave him some money and he and the girl drifted off. After that Peter only wanted to be a physician. He went to the doctor once after that feigning some illness but really to talk about becoming a doctor. The doctor and Peter talked about the girl, whose name was Melinda, and about becoming a doctor. The older man was solicitous and gave Peter a little more money and told Peter that he would help him get into medical school if he kept his mouth shut. Then he made out a bill for the visit for his father which Peter took home. The specialist charged his father for a complete examination and a set of allergy tests.

Just before Peter Triff graduated college he got sick again and visited the specialist who, true to his word, wrote a glowing letter to his alma mater’s medical school praising the young man’s talents and outlook on life which he said would make him an excellent physician and a rich alumnus.

In lieu of the money which he usually gave Peter, he offered to call the dean of the medical school whom he had gotten out of a jam when the were college students together, and personally recommend Peter to him. For Peter Triff getting into medical school was a snap.

As soon as he entered medical school he looked around for a specialty that was suited to his talents. He considered surgery, obstetrics, neurology and internal medicine. He settled on psychiatry only after he had a minor nervous breakdown and was treated in a small private mental hospital close to the medical school. The size of the bill decided his specialty.

Knowing what he wanted to be calmed Peter Triff. He finished medical school and completed a residency without incident. His ideas about what he wanted to do matured. When he completed his residency he looked around for a place to begin what he hoped would be a rapid, effortless climb to the top. He settled on a medium sized city with primitive but well known psychiatric facilities. He started a small private practice and when a small but exclusive mental hospital opened he got himself appointed to the staff. He also took a part time position which opened up at the old outmoded but nationally known lunatic asylum which was run as a collective tax write off by the elite of the community.

Peter Triff had big ideas.

He realized people always thought of him as wanting to make a lot of money, as being driven, ambitious and ruthless. It was not true, at least not all of it.

He hated the greedy doctors he saw around him who were only interested in fees, fees, fees, who nickled and dimed their salary up by unnecessary tests they had done by laboratories from which they received kickbacks or had patients return and return again for examinations they did not need. Peter Triff hated money.

He was working as hard as he could so that he would be able to save as much money as possible and retire as soon as possible and never have to think about money ever again. Of course, temporarily, it was the only thing on his mind.

But Peter Triff had bigger ideas. He was tuned into the future which he saw as offering enormous potential for the right kind of doctor.

“Computers,” a patient told him one day, “computers are the future, like plastic to your father’s generation.” This patient had the delusion he was a computer, a giant computer with terminals everywhere. “I can do anything,” he told Peter Triff from the couch one day. “I can run the factories, I can run the country. Anyone can run it even if they’re stark raving mad if they use me.” Peter believed him.

The episode set Peter Triff thinking. The crazy loon was right. Computers were the future. He thought about it constantly, whenever money was not on his mind, trying to ferret out the spot where the opportunities lay. The computer was a compass, the problem was to figure out which in direction it was pointing. He finally came up with an idea that he believed would let him retire staggeringly rich and never have to think about money again.

The mad house could be computerized, and the software could be packaged, so that lunatic asylums would become as easy to run as a McDonald’s or Pizza Hut. The computer could diagnose patients. The computer could determine and prescribe drugs. A computer could keep inventories. A computer could order supplies, A computer could fill out the forms insurance companies and the government required. With a computer any person with ambition and enough money could own his own lunatic asylum. With the right set up even his father’s floozy could run a major facility.

The first idea led to a second. He could franchise lunatic asylums. He could start a world wide chain of mad houses, all of which would be run by computers and software that he would sell.

Peter Triff had found his dream and felt complete. And, in the old facility he worked at, run by a nobody liver specialist who hadn’t mastered the fundamentals of making money taking care of people, he believed he had found the mother hospital, the place he could use to put his ideas into practice and jump start the machinery of getting rich and retiring. He hoped his mother would eat her heart out.

Nick Strayte first saw Peter Triff upside down but even upside down everything was in place. His body moved at an oblique along Strayte’s field of vision. The man, who was obviously a doctor, glanced at him and then passed out of his field of vision. He looked as well put together from the bottom up as the top down. He was dressed for some formal occasion, Armani suit, buffed smooth alligator shoes with gold tipped tassels. He had a thin mustache on an open face. And his jacket pockets bulged.

His features seemed to be put together with an aim towards their total effect. Taken separately they were somewhere between frivolous and silly, but together they played off with one another with an alarming effectiveness. Like the workers of a Japanese corporation they were devoted to the idea of cooperation, to the ideal of working together for a common purpose.

His hair was a cold blond except for a curl of battleship gray that was in exactly the right place to hint that he was older than the youth the rest of him announced he was, borrowing the authority of the person he’s going to become in the service of the person he was.

“Up,” he said sharply to Strayte, as he yanked open the curtain that closed off the back of the room. His voice simultaneously conveyed anger tempered by camaraderie, good fellowship and noblesse oblige.

Strayte pulled himself half upright on the bed.

“Sleeping on the job, uh,” the young authority said. He whistled a disapproving whistle and belched gracefully. “What if the worker who was responsible for restraining this person,” he pointed dramatically at a figure in front of him as he drew the curtain, “had been careless.” The disheveled figure, half sitting half crouching on the bed, was handcuffed to an iron ring welded onto the bed. “Up,” he economically spoke to both semi prone figures at once.

“They didn’t tell me we were getting a …,” he looked at Strayte, “resident.” Well, no one ever tells me anything,” he sang out in a self derogatory, mocking manner, the very saying of it belying what was said. His words carried the message, ‘I don’t have anything to worry about from anybody, I’m sane in a world of crazies, I’m young in a world of aged incompetents. I’m me in a world of not me’s.’ “My name is Peter Triff.” Strayte became frightened.

“You can listen and learn something,” he said to Strayte as he turned to the creature on the bed. “How did you sleep, last night? Not well I guess. There will be time enough for sleeping later. I got a call about you yesterday,” he said cheerfully. “The police.” His voice changed into a conspiratorial whisper. “You know,” he made a gesture as he turned to Strayte, “he murdered his wife and two small children.” There was no repulsion in the voice only a superior affirmation that he would never do such a thing or, if he did, he would never get caught the way this pathetic creature had.

“Refuses to tell the police where he stashed the corpses. You are a naughty fellow aren’t you.”

The heap on the bed glared at him.

“Crazy is crazy,” Peter Triff said.

“Are you here to decide if I’m crazy?” the lump on the bed whimpered.

The doctor erupted into a subdued geyser of laughter and winked at Strayte. “Oh that’s clear enough. You’re here so you’re crazy. No, I don’t think there’s any question about that. “There’s no question that you are crazy.” He looked incredulously at the former person on the bed. “There is no question your mind or what was your mind that you are absolutely, totally crazy is there? If you aren’t absolutely sure you’re crazy it would be evidence, if you needed any evidence at all, that you are completely, unequivocally mad.” He hesitated. “There is no question in your mind that you are nuts is there?”

The mouth on the top of the heap of human parts on the bed responded. “No, I guess I am crazy.”

“Well that simplifies things a little,” the doctor said. He reached into his breast pocket and took out a Mont Blanc pen and set it on the table beside the bed, then reached in again and took out an antique Parker and set it beside it. A final reconnoitre produced blue Bic Round Stic which took its place on the table beside him. He picked up the Mont Blanc and wrote energetically on the patient’s chart, in bold black letters, with the concentration of a child setting his first words to paper, “Patient admits he is crazy.”

“Since when?”

“Since when what?” the mound of flesh croaked. The heap on the bed was having difficulty mustering up energy to meet the challenge of the interview. All of his energy seemed devoted to managing the placement of his parts so that he would retain the semblance of humanity.

“When did you start believing you were crazy?”

“Last night when they brought me here.”

“Well, it helps that you know you are crazy,” Peter Triff said. “Of course, on the outside, where you used to live, crazy is crazy,” he said, “but in here it’s not so simple. The question here is what kind of crazy. You don’t know exactly what kind of crazy you are do you. It would save us both a lot of work.”

The patient gurgled.

Peter Triff looked at the heap on the bed benignly then he checked Strayte out to make sure that all of his audience was paying attention. “It’s not enough to be crazy,” he announced. “You have to be definitely crazy. Your craziness has to have a name. You got yourself into that box. You can’t blame me for it. You can’t even blame him,” he pointed to Strayte. “Now,” he said, as if he had come to the point of his exposition “what kind of crazy are you? You can be, you can be….” He struggled to put himself at the beginning of a sentence, “you can be diagnostically crazy meaning you fit a diagnostic category that’s in the standard manual. You don’t have to fit exactly of course, just enough. You could be schizophrenic, you could be bipolar. Bye the bye,” he asked. “was your mother crazy?”

The patient screeched.

“O.K, O.K., I’m a doctor. It’s all right if you talk about these things to me. It’s not important.” He flicked his pen across the chart. “Family history of mental illness. I guess you are probably not diagnostically crazy. We can ignore that one. You could be certifiably crazy which means….Are you listening?”

The patient growled and rolled around; Strayte made a clicking sound.

“Good. You’re certifiably crazy when you don’t fit any particular category in a big way but you fit a lot of them in a lot of little ways.”

The patient stretched out one of his feet.

The doctor put down the Mont Blanc pen and picked up the Parker and wrote furiously “patient stuck out foot” in bright red ink.

“Of course you might be uncategorically crazy. It’s sometimes called Wutzenheimer’s syndrome.” He looked at the patient critically. “It’s very rare. You fit two or more of the categories in the manual exactly. Not likely,” he said to himself and continued.

“By the way, did your father marry a fluzzy? It’s not a question that I usually ask but it might explain a lot in your case.”

The body on the bed jerked uncontrollably for a moment. The doctor scribbled, ‘unstable upbringing,’ on the chart.

“Well, no matter. I was just curious. Then there’s behaviorally crazy. It’s when you behave like a crazy person and everyone can see it but it’s hard to say exactly how you are crazy. That might fit you. It seems to fit, “he suggested. “Did you ever have hallucinations, like…seeing, oh lets say, Superman?”

Strayte trembled for a moment. The mass of flesh on the bed moved his head side to side in a giant, quiet no.

“Well, there’s an outside chance you are undulationally crazy. That’s when you are sailing between categories like a junk in a storm. Some of the craziest people I know are leaping around like a drop of water on a hot frying pan between clinically crazy and diagnostically crazy and uncategorically crazy. It’s the drugs that do it. Do you understand? What do you think?”

The heap thought about it and stuck his finger in his nose.

“That’s a disgusting habit,” said the doctor. “I take it the answer is no.”

“Of course you could be ‘just crazy,’” Peter Triff continued. “It’s the worst kind of crazy, very hard to distinguish from the other categories. It’s very close to being not sane, which has quite a different etiology. It’s a garbage can category, I admit. I hate to use it, it’s like a confession of…, of not looking deeply or carefully enough.” He leaned close to the patient. “Which are you? You can tell me.”

The heap held itself very very still.

“No matter. It’s a detail we can worry about later. Now lets talk about the important thing. What did you do with the bodies?”

The heap thrashed scrunching his finger in his nose. Then he screamed.

The doctor pulled back. “Ah, hah, hit a sensitive nerve, huh.” He turned to Strayte. “ You can never tell about crazy people. Could you get me a cup of coffee? I think the cafeteria opening just about now. It’s down the hall on the left. Go. Now!” he barked.

Strayte got up lazily.

“Now!” the doctor snarled.

He had reached to door when he heard a whack, then another and another. “The bodies,” Peter Triff insisted, “Where did you put the bodies, you maniac?”

Nick Strayte started to turn when he heard the voice of the young doctor. “COFFEE NOW!” Strayte opened the door and went out.

He wandered for a few moments looking for a sign that said cafeteria. “Shit,” he muttered. He turned and headed back.

“Not open yet?” the doctor asked cheerily, when Strayte opened the door.”

On the bed the heap had hidden his head and was moaning quietly. There was blood on the bed and blanket.

“O.K.,” said the young doctor,“now we can begin from the beginning more or less.“ He turned to the bed. “What did you do with the bodies?”

“I didn’t kill them,” the voice from under the covers protested. “I only said I did.” The doctor was silent. “I only said I did. She ran away. With a salesman from Duluth. She took the kids. I couldn’t stand it.” The doctor pulled off the covers and pulled the man’s hands away from his face.

“Look at me.”

The heap found it’s head and shifted it in the direction of the voice that was screaming at it. Blood was dripping from its nose.

“Is that true?”

“Yes.” There was a lightness in the heap’s voice. “I didn’t kill them. I just couldn’t stand the humiliation.”

“Absolutely,” the young doctor picked up the unused Bic pen from the table and used it deftly to make a notation in blue in on the chart. “just crazy,” he wrote and gathered up all of the pens and put them back in his pocket.

He turned to Strayte. “You see how it’s done,” he said. “Masterful,” he commented on his own performance and turned and headed for the door. “I’m afraid he wet the bed. You’ll have to get someone to clean it or do it yourself, no rush. And the blood. Must have dug too deeply in his nose with that finger. It’s a disgusting habit. We’ll talk later,” he said to Strayte, “and get acquainted. It pays to know who’s side you’re on.” From deep inside of him the sound of a beeper erupted. “After you clean up, make yourself useful, Take the patients to breakfast,” he said as he floated out the door.

“Do you want some water?” Strayte asked as he turned to leave? The heap was shaking uncontrollably. Strayte filled a glass of water from the pitcher on the dresser and held it out. The heap took a few sips and put the glass down.

“I didn’t, I couldn’t kill them. I couldn’t. I loved them.”

Strayte picked up an edge of the sheet and reached over, talking to the lump of flesh as it pulled out of reach of his hand. “Its O.K..” He wiped the blood from the man’s nose. “If she’s run away you’ve got to come to terms with it. Don’t worry, everything will be O.K,” he said, but he was convinced it wasn’t true.

Chapter 9

Life is a Punch and Judy show and you’re the Judy.

Nurse G expected a modicum of order. If you couldn’t maintain order in a lunatic asylum where else in the world could you expect to keep it.

She could understand the patients not insisting on order. They were constantly being ordered around by the staff. They had activities most of the morning and afternoon and therapy. They did not have time to be interested in maintaining order.

Except for the fact that their jobs depended on disorder, she could not comprehend was why the staff did not stand behind her and insist on order. They did not seem to understand that if they insisted on order the idea of order would eventually percolate down to the patients then it would trickle back up to them and Vermeers would become an orderly place—as far as a mad house could be orderly.

Dr. Heirath, the acting administrator and acting chief medical officer and acting chief psychiatrist never gave any of the new aides or orderlies instructions. She didn’t blame him. The poor man had been tricked by the ex-chief medical officer and the wandering administrator into shouldering responsibility for everything in the hospital when he thought that he was only going to be responsible for cuts and bruises. She had tried to warn him of the hoax when he came to be interviewed but he misunderstood the gestures and took her for a patient.

The only person who made any attempt at all to establish an order on the ward was Peter Triff, the young assistant psychiatrist whom she despised because he was rude, greedy and determined and because she could never give him instructions on how to maintain order for more than twelve minutes before his beeper went off and he disappeared chirping “emergency.” He tried to maintain order by insisting that the patients be crazy in a quiet and orderly manner and ordering the aides to control patients who insisted on being crazy in a noisy and inappropriate manner. As soon as she saw him giving orders to any of the staff she cornered the person and told them to disregard any orders he gave, especially any orders about the patients maintaining order.

Nurse G first came to work at Vermeers because she had a dream. The dream frightened her and she thought she might wake up completely crazy. When she woke up completely sane, she took the dream as an omen that she was going to go crazy soon. In the dream she was a nurse in charge of ward in a mental hospital in which the patients were crazy and did crazy things and never maintained any order at all and she was unable to make them be orderly. It was a real nightmare.

The day after she had the dream she quit her job as nurse/receptionist for a dermatologist and accepted a job at Vermeers as a ward nurse so that when she went crazy, she would go crazy in a place that she knew well and felt at home in. After a while she realized that the dream was not a portent of a horror in store for her but a foretaste of the lunacy that she had gotten herself into as a way of avoiding the anticipated consequences of going mad.

She was never sure that the public craziness at Vermeers had effectively displaced the private insanity that was lazily dormant inside of her but what she knew was a lot of craziness in which she had a definite place. In fact she was close to its center.

She had dreamed the dream about going crazy only once before she started working at Vermeers but she had it constantly since then. She had asked Dr. Heirath about it. He told her it was probably because her liver was having a hard time digesting the fat and salt that the hospital cook used liberally in everything he cooked. It did not help her understand the dream at all.

The heart of her dream was an escalator ride. She could always tell by the dream how her life was going. If she was doing well, she would be traveling the escalator up. If things were not going so well she would be traveling down. Usually she was on the down escalator. Her discontent with herself was also expressed by the fact that in her dream, no matter if she was going up or down, she was going very slowly compared to the other people on the escalator who were moving very quickly. The illogic of people traveling the same escalator going up and down at different speeds disturbed her. What made the experience even more annoying was the fact that the other people on the escalator were always facing her.

The floor toward which the escalator was taking her was crowded with people behaving crazily. She could see that they were lunatics who had escaped from an asylum and that the escalator was going to deposit her in the center of a platform crowded with mad men and women.

The escalator invariably passed a little balcony suspended from the ceiling of the station. On the platform there was a group of musicians. It was always the same 3-piece band; a supple girl with a tambourine, a handsome trumpet player and something that looked like a gorilla or a person dressed in a realistic gorilla suit playing a baby tuba. They were always performing the same tune, which she could never remember when she woke up. Each night the three-piece band made the escalator ride seem a prelude to an exciting adventure which never came because the escalator ride seemed to exhaust the time allowed for dreaming.

She usually woke up from the dream tired and in a foul mood. She kept two cats for the purpose of relieving that mood which interfered with the attitude she needed to do her job which was to maintain order at Vermeers. That mood required a ferocious calm.

When she woke out of the dream, one of the cats could be depended on to read her feeling. While one curled up lethargically and purred, the other, usually the one who had eaten most of the food she brought home for them from the hospital, would attack her, hissing and trying to scratch her with its declawed paws. She would respond with a vindictive smack with a rolled up newspaper she kept ready for the occasion. “Life is a punch and Judy show,” she would say, as she flailed away, “and you’re the Judy.” In the release of energy she was restored to the mental stance she needed for work.

She had a husband for a while after she left the Army Nurses Corps. She had fallen completely in love with him the first time she saw him in the dermatologist’s office. She loved him with an aching passion that seeped in and filled her with cravings and obsessions and lust under so much pressure she was overwhelmed and couldn’t think.

When she remembered him, she remembered a riot of disorders of a variety of sorts, mostly erotic. Loving him made her life chaotic. It got to a point where she had to make a choice between happiness and order. She let him go, put him out like a cat who had become unresponsive and disorderly.

She was surprised at remembering him. He was an old disorder that she had patted down and smoothed out and forgotten like wrinkles on an old quilt. She looked around for something that might have reminded her of something about him—like the wart he had on his toe or the body odor that at first had disturbed her but which she realized broadcast the level of his amorous intentions so that she could read his mind by reading his body.

She was perplexed until she spotted an unfamiliar face on a strange body. They had put a new aide—by the way he was dressed he might even be a new doctor—on the ward without telling her. She felt the cold chill of chaos encroaching on the order of the ward, her order.

When the administration hired a new doctor or sent a new orderly or aide to the ward without telling her she felt the fabric of the hospital was unraveling and she got testy. She was sure that no one ever gave the new people any instructions at all, certainly not any instructions about maintaining order or getting the patients to maintain order.

As if anticipating trouble, the face turned toward her and propelled itself in her direction.

Nick Strayte assumed the nurse who was staring at him was in charge. She looked in charge and she looked upset at his unexpected presence.

“I’m supposed to take the patients to breakfast,” he said as cheerfully as he could.

“Who are you?” Nurse G stared at him estimating his potential for creating disorder.

“I’m Dr. Nick Strayte,” Strayte answered. “The young doctor with the beeper told me to take the patients to breakfast.” His name and title slipped out before he had considered whether it was a strategic way of presenting himself.

Nurse G looked at him suspiciously. “Don’t pay any attention to what Dr. Beeper said. Don’t pay attention to anything Dr.Beeper says, ever. Are you really a doctor?” she asked, her face drawing to a question mark.

Strayte recognized the look. It was very much like the look that Dean Grundle gave him when they first met. “Of course I’m a doctor,” he told both of them.

“What’s your specialty?” she asked suspiciously.

Nick Strayte said the first thing that came to mind. “Disorder and chaos.” Nurse G relaxed a little.

She wanted to tell him to take the patients to breakfast but she was not sure she could trust him to do it before she gave him instructions on maintaining order at Vermeers. If she didn’t start him off on the right foot she might never be able to get him to maintain order seriously. She hesitated. It was quietest part of the day because, usually after breakfast all hell broke loose somewhere on the ward. It was the only chance she would get to finish the last few pages of the chapter of the novel she was reading.

She looked at the man in the white uniform in front of her. The aides who were assigned to the ward could not be counted on any more to show up for work. A man who claimed he was a doctor was here, he was wearing a uniform. He looked more like an orderly than an intern or a resident but you could not tell anything from the way people looked. Her husband had looked well groomed and neat when she first saw him in the office of the dermatologist for whom she had started working because he looked like what she thought a doctor should look like.

“Forget what Dr. Beeper said. Take the patients to breakfast,” she ordered, looking at him to see if he would confuse her order with the one Dr. Beeper gave him.

“You want me to take the patients to breakfast,” Strayte repeated. He remembered enough Sociology to know that the same order given by two different people was two distinct orders.

Nurse G was satisfied.

Strayte thought about his situation for a moment. He was an associate professor of Sociology who was impersonating a doctor doing an orderly’s job in a lunatic asylum. He was a professional analyst. He was used to treating life itself as data, as a clue to what, disguised as the commonplace, was hiding from him, just below the surface of people’s behavior. Yet, here he was in a situation that cried out for distance and an analytical stance and the only thing he could wonder about was where breakfast was.

“Where’s breakfast?” Strayte asked.

“You are new here,” the nurse in the starched white uniform repeated.

“I am new.” Strayte said it with such innocence that he surprised himself.

“Breakfast is in the cafeteria. Straight down the hall, last door to the left.”

He is new, Nurse G thought to herself. His uniform is too clean. She tried to remember whether her husband had ever worn a uniform but she could only remember him in the shabby worn pair of woman’s underpants that he paraded around the house in. It was not even her underpants which might have made the spectacle romantic and demonstrated he was connected to her. She had tried once to show him what she was feeling by parading around in a pair of his underpants but he hardly noticed.

The memory faded quickly. She could only remember a few things about her husband and fewer about the marriage except that she had put him out. She always stressed the ‘out’ because she was worried that people might hear ‘down’ which she hadn’t, although the idea had come into her mind once or twice.

He had run away just after they found out she was pregnant and although he had come back a few days later, she had already had the abortion. She put him out as she had the lump growing inside of her that the barely competent doctor had twisted out of her body and flushed down the stained sink in his examining room.

Strayte started out then stopped. “Where are the patients I’m supposed to take there?”

Nurse G pointed in the opposite direction then hesitated. “Wait a minute.” She tried to think. The image of her husband turned sharply on his heels and revolved in front of her. He was teasing her. He had a stupid grin on his face as if he was celebrating his release from a prison of orderliness, freed into a world of proper disorder. “Wait a minute. Today is Tuesday. Whose day, Henry Henry or John John?”

Strayte realized she was talking to someone but not to him.

“Tuesday.” The image of a computer surfaced in her mind. “Other way; They’ll be in the sun room.” She hesitated, not quite trusting her memory. “Or strung out in front of the west wing. You can’t miss them.” Her husband twirled again. He could see he was wearing a new pair of woman’s underwear again. The label was on the outside: Victoria Secrets. The color was not bad but she hated the style and she hated him although she had loved him before she married him and for a while afterward.

“Where’s the sun room?” Strayte’s voice was innocence itself.

“There,” she pointed with her chin, stretching until she looked like one of those long necked clams that Strayte associated with summer vacations at the beach.

He was like a child with his questions, like her husband, Nurse G thought, and picked up her novel.

Strayte headed in the direction of her chin. As he passed a large potted plant whose broad leaves were curling like the end of an oddly rolled cigar, he saw the ward’s patients gathered in a circle around four men, two of whom were arguing.

A short agile black man jabbed a smooth delicate finger at a gangly, balding man with wire rimmed glasses opposite him, at the same time as he pushed the crowd of patients back by snapping his butt at them. As Strayte got closer he realized that the protagonists were only the agents of the central parties to the dispute.

“He needs them today, he has an inspiration.” The voice was dry and solid.

“We had an agreement” the man in spectacles stated decisively but leaving room for negotiation. “He has a chip design in mind he wants to try out.” He swivelled to the man by his adversary’s side. “You want to trade?” he asked the man directly. The man nodded. “We want tomorrow and Friday. And we need a sketch. Pencil. A technical drawing.” The man he spoke to suddenly looked as if he were going to cry.

“You know you can’t talk loud at his face,” the black man said, sticking himself between the man with glasses and the man by his side who had almost started crying. “You know that. He’ll give you tomorrow and the sketch. No Friday.” The balding man turned to the man by his side who was already walking away. “Is it O.K.? “ The man didn’t answer. “It’s O.K.,” his manager said. The black man reached in a bag he was carrying and took out a large studio camera with a Polaroid back.

“Its breakfast time,” Strayte boomed out as he approached the group. No one paid any attention to him. The black man stretched his arm out towards Strayte. “You got to wait.” Strayte waited.

The dreamy looking man by the black man’s side moved away and began grabbing patients and dragging them to an open space at the end of the hall. When he had collected what he wanted he arranged the people he had selected into a frieze and harried the others around them as a background. He grabbed Strayte.

“Wait a minute,” Strayte complained. “I’m…” The man who had seized his arm paid no attention to his protests. He moved him to near the center of the group and pushed his feet into place. Then he moved down the line of models arranging other bodies.

He stood back and examined the composition then ran around adjusting heads and arms and legs. He grabbed Strayte again. His hands moved swiftly molding Strayte’s face. He hooked a finger into his mouth and stretched it. Strayte had the feeling his features were changing under the man’s fingers. His eyes opened, his mouth went slack. His head was tilted in a way that felt like he was trying to leap off of the ground and fly.

When the man was done, he moved on again. Strayte found it difficult to move. He seemed held in place by the way that the faces and bodies of the people around him were positioned.

The artist continued sculpting people, tilting and caressing their features returning to restructure the few men who lost their pose. He came back and raised Strayte’s arms and lifted him so that he stood on his toes. “Stretch up. Stretch up. Like this.” He demonstrated the position he wanted Strayte to take.

Strayte extended his body.

“Up, up,” the man instructed and demonstrated the position again. Then he walked around and readjusted other patients.

He leapt back and looked at the composition.

The black man focused the camera he had taken from his bag. He was holding a camera release between his fingers. “Now?” he yelled. The man arranging the people ignored him, and continued adjusting his models, lifting an arm here correcting the motions of some of the trembling and tic ridden patients there. The black man steadied the camera. “It’s getting there,” he yelled encouragingly. “I can see it. Yeah. Now?” he asked again.

The man arranging the patients stopped and pulled himself away from the frieze and lay down on the floor examining the arrangement from a new angle. He stuck his thumb in his mouth. “Now,” he mumbled, the sounds garbled by the clog of his finger in his mouth.

At the word ‘now’ Strayte heard the click of the camera. He felt as if the matrix in which he had been held motionless shattered and he had soared into the air and plummeted in a single instant. The group fell apart as if it had been a piece of stone completely pulverized by the grazing touch of some delicate woodland creature. “Did you see it,”the black man shouted. “Did you see it? It’s a masterpiece.” He was jumping up and down.

Strayte recovered his composure and moved to the front of the group as if nothing had happened.

“Breakfast,” he shouted and the patients fell in together behind him. “Breakfast,” they shouted and set off behind Strayte who headed in the direction he thought the nurse had pointed to. But he realized, after he had gone fifty steps or so, that he had lost his entourage. He backtracked and saw them heading toward the dining room on their own.

All that was left for him to do was wait for one of the patients who had mistaken a hole in the wall for a urinal and catch up with the crowd.

Chapter 10

It is important to distinguish what you need from what you want. It is even more important to distinguish what you want from what you want to want. But what is most important of all is to distinguish what you want badly from what you want badly, but not badly enough.

As he waited on the line for breakfast, Leonard Mittleman remembered two lives. They were clear and distinct in his memory.

In one of the lives he remembered clearly, he worked as a clerk in the office of a trading company. He was not sure exactly what they traded or if they traded anything at all because for the first ten years of his working life he spent his day taking folders out of a file cabinet and putting them back after he was done with them. He worked with six other people in an office in which there were six desks, six phones and six filing cabinets. Everyone who worked in the office did the same thing.

The phone would ring and a voice would provide a name and he would get out the folder with that name on it from the file cabinet. “Which day was the company incorporated on?” or “Does the firm have its main office in Duluth or Kuwait.” It was always the same clear, hollow voice demanding information. “Duluth,” he would say or “Kuwait.” Then the person on the other end would hang up and the phone would go dead.

Except for the fact that the pay was excellent, especially the bonuses that came on Christmas and the founder’s birthday, he would have quit, especially after they computerized the office and took out the phone. After that he sat in front of a computer and a message would appear on the screen. “In what year was Watzenheimer Industrials incorporated?” it would ask or, “does the Martinuzi Corporation have its main office in Duluth or Kuwait?” He would punch a few keys and information would appear on his screen. Then he would type “1892,” or “Duluth,” and the screen would go dead. It deprived him of the voice on the phone which had made the job moderately interesting.

In the second life he remembered, he owned the trading company in which he worked in the other life. Sometimes he bought and sold companies that were in bankruptcy or near it. He bought them then smashed them into pieces and sold the pieces and made a lot of money. Sometimes he bought a company that did not yet know it was on the ropes and close to bankruptcy and he would smash it into pieces and make even more money on the pieces.

Sometimes he formed a big company out of four small companies that were ready to go into bankruptcy separately so that in a few months all of them could go into bankruptcy together which meant a lot more money. Often, these deals took years. It required infinite patience and cunning but he was known in the industry for his shrewdness and tenacity.

“Where do you get your cunning and patience from?” some competitor would ask him at the annual convention of traders and brokers.

“I traded all my desire for it, every hormone in my body” he responded honestly.

He had mastered the logic that would make a company’s disaster substantial in court and profitable, and that logic depended on a pattern of infinite details. He spent his day struggling to identify the crucial pieces of data that would let him make the decision to buy or refrain from buying, to sell or hold off selling. Sometimes it was as inconsequential a fact as when the company was incorporated or where its main office was.

In both of the lives he remembered, he was married to the same woman only in each life she came from a different background. In one she came from a poor family. In the other she came from a family that had been poor but had become extremely rich. He and his wife appeared together at functions which required him to be married. She was a vague character in his memory which he remembered only as a back which faced him at night in bed. In both of the lives he remembered, they had two children, but they also were shadowy creatures who went off one day after which he never remembered seeing them again.

Both of the lives he remembered came together when he went insane.

In the clerk’s life he went insane on the 10th anniversary of his coming to work for the firm. He came to work that day in a cheery mood. He sat down in front of his computer, turned it on and said good morning to the men who worked on either side of him. They were surly and distracted, as he was on days that were not special. He sat there a while and fielded a few questions. Then the screen lit up and a face appeared that said to him. “You’ve been promoted. You now are the president of the company. Go and find your office and take control.” No face had ever appeared on his screen before.

He got up, shut off the computer and walked into the president’s office. He yanked the man sitting behind the oak desk up out of his seat and flung him to the floor.

“I’ve been promoted. You’re through. Out.” He luxuriated in his new found prominence, swirling and rocking in the rich leather chair. He turned to the computer on his desk and typed messages to his former co-workers. “Buy or sell,” he typed, “buy or sell.”

After fifteen minutes two burly armed security officers came and took him to a small office in the basement. Then a horse wagon came and took him to Vermeers. He had enjoyed being the president of the company for a while but he anticipated that the job would be stressful and he wasn’t really unhappy that he had been sacked.

In his life as owner of the trading company he went insane also, but it was not so simple. He went insane because a deal he had been working on for four years fell through in the worst possible way. This deal was going to cap his working life.

For Christmas, his wife had given him a book called PRE-RETIREMENT: SLOUCHING TOWARD YOUR FUTURE. The book said that modern technology, computers, telephones and faxes made it possible for businessmen to work at their leisure, pre-retired anywhere, even on a beach in Mexico. Although at forty-three he was too young to retire, he intended to pre-retire after completing the megadeal.

He knew just the beach. It was a long stretch of deserted ocean front with white sand and palm trees and a hut that sold cool drinks and fish that had been roasted over fires in open pits. He had bought and sold it twice. You could sit by the water next to the computer and do your buying and selling part time by satellite, the book said. Leonard Mittleman was not sure he believed what the book said because he had bought and sold the publisher several times and the transactions never amounted to anything substantial.

The first requirement for a successful pre retirement was to review your life. ‘Review your life,’ the book instructed.

His life flashed before him.

He started his climb to the top as a clerk, working in the back room of a brokerage house along with a hundred other clerks. But ambition burned in him and while they played catch in the street during lunch and went out evenings and picked up girls in clubs and got laid, he slumped in his bed and tried to discover how to get rich.

Stretched out, alone in his bed, the way you made money seemed obvious: buy what people needed cheap and sell it to them dear. But that didn’t seem the way it was done. He realized the real principles of making a lot of money were deep and not obvious at all. While his peers were doing the club scene and watching out for social diseases he spent his nights trying to distill the real principles of getting rich.

There seemed to be two of them.

Principle one was;

MASTER DESIRE: NEED DOESN’T MEAN SHIT.

He recognized after only a few days of thinking about it that what people needed had very little to do with getting rich. Except for very poor people, need had nothing to do with desire or wanting, and that even for poor people the connection was tenuous at best.

Practically speaking, mastering desire meant dominating ones own desire and manipulating the desire of others.

The difficultly was pinning desire down. Desire was a chameleon like creature that could change not only its color but its form and substance also. Pinning desire down might be the first step in getting rich but it was very difficult because desire was dynamic, in constant motion.

Leonard Mittleman recognized early in his climb upward that desire was always incomplete and that it strove constantly to give itself a form and shape, to attach itself to some object that could be wanted. Scrunched in his bed watching people on late night television talking about getting rich, he realized that human beings often knew very clearly what they wanted but not one of them had the least clue about what they really desired. This was true if what the person wanted was as simple as a bag of popcorn or as complex as owning a chain of newspapers. Desire always lurked out of wanting’s field of vision.

Sometimes when he looked at people he met, he could see that the connection between their want and their desire was tangled and twisted. The gap between wanting and desiring was stuffed with money to be taken for the asking.

After he discovered the first principle of making money it took him a long time to uncover the second principle. The second principle was:

DESIRE DOESN’T MEAN SHIT; WANTING DOESN’T MEAN SHIT; ORGANIZATION AND POWER IS EVERYTHING.

The second principle confused him because it seemed to contradict the first principle.

As an axiom it was a little exaggerated. After a few months of studying it he realized that what the principle was saying was that desire became distorted as soon as the person acted to satisfy it.

People didn’t have the balls to grab what they desired openly and honestly. And they lacked the brains to desire what was close enough to them that they could get it by reaching out and pulling it in. People were always at least one person away from what they desired. People always needed other people to help them get what they wanted to satisfy their desires.

It shocked him to realize that, simple or complex, not a want got satisfied unless there was a lot of movement by a lot of people and organizations, little movements and minuscule organizations perhaps but movements and organizations none the less.

He thought in these two principles he had found out all he needed to know to make money. The secret of getting rich had revealed itself to him. He would put together an organization that would bypass what people wanted and control and satisfy people’s desires directly.

But after a while of trying with no success to use these principles, he realized that he had missed something and went back and retraced his steps. On that return journey he discovered that he had overlooked an indirection that was essential: there was another hidden level of twist and turn and that it was really the secret to making big money.

He could not take all the credit for the discovery of this secret. He had listened to a lecture broadcast from the college and a Sociology professor had talked about organizations in a way that provoked his own inventiveness.

This professor said that all organizations, even the simplest ones, fed, breeded, got sick, used resources, ate and went to sleep and needed a place to defecate. They were infinitely vain and preoccupied with themselves and they had short memories and got distracted easily. When they lost their concentration, as they did almost immediately after they were formed, they turned inward and complicated themselves.

The original wants they had come into being to satisfy became embedded in a different set of wants that came from the organization itself. The perverseness of desire was surpassed by the narcissistic, self stimulation of organizations, the spontaneous generation of necessities that came out of the attempt by anyone to satisfy anyone elses need

Every organization, the sociologist said, from the moment it was founded severed itself from the direct connection to anyone’s needs, desires or wants and hemaphrodidically re-attached itself to the needs of the organization itself.

A veil was pulled from Leonard Mittleman’s eyes. He started doing business in the evening after work. While his peers were drinking and getting married he was doing business on the stoops and bodegas and Korean markets of his neighborhood. He started small. He bought a collection of coins which he traded for a collection of dolls which he sold to one by one to antique shops over the city. Initially, the profit in money was small. That was not important. What was important was that in each of these transactions he transformed and rebuilt himself, himself as a person, into an organization.

After a while he enlarged his operations. He sold the rights to things people did not even know they possessed, for control they did not even know they could exert. He traded the rights to teenager’s mistakes to childless couples before the mistake had been committed. He traded rights to alimony to third parties who were looking for ways to hedge obligations for child support.

He sold a group of people’s expertise in satisfying a set of dark impulses to another group of persons for the possibility of exploiting a third parties frivolous desires.

He bought obligations to reinsure the insured uninsurable and sold them to foreign investors looking for ways to launder money made selling rights to pollute. And with each transaction he advanced his transformation of himself into an organization

His real break came when he was beaten out of a deal to sell a bankrupt Indian reservation to a Japanese electronics firm. The competitor who defeated him was an older man who was a legend in the trading business. This man contacted him and suggested a partnership. He accepted the offer without hesitation because he admired the way the man, who had built himself into a complete and powerful organization, had taken advantage of his weaknesses.

The partnership flourished. When the man died, Leonard Mittleman bought out his dead partner’s daughter for the price of the building they worked out of and a proposal of marriage.

The space his company occupied had a front room and a back room. The front room was his office. It had been designed as the vestibule of a firm intending to manufacture computers in Haiti. The back room, which had been designed as a conference room, held his six permanent employees. The other 40,000 square feet he held as room for expansion.

He had bought and sold and traded and had become rich. Then the deal that would cap his career presented itself to him.

It would make him so rich that money, which had already become obscure as a reason for doing business, would disappear from the equation entirely.

On the day the deal was going to be concluded he woke up in with a sense of foreboding although there was nothing he could attach his feelings to. When he was shaving, he noticed a small pimple on his chest near his breast. He became obsessed with picking at it. As the skin of the pimple broke all of his desire, the desire he had mastered and dominated spilled out. There was an endless flow of it. He tried to stop the hemorrhaging but he could not. He pressed a towel to the wound but the hole in him grew larger. His desire poured out of him in a great whooshing stream. He found himself drowning in it and lost consciousness. By the time he woke up the deal had fallen though and he went crazy.

He could not tell if either of the lives he remembered or the third life which lay isolated and inaccessible in his mind was his real life. It did not matter. He did not think about his lives much, only at mealtimes and only when he was waiting, as he was now, on line to eat. Vermeers was Vermeers, crazy was crazy and he had gotten used to both of them.

~~

The line for breakfast snaked around making giant loops like a string of DNA on a gene. Where the loops touched, the line exchanged participants so that who was in front constantly changed.

Strayte waited at the back patiently while the patients, curled and merry go rounded in front of him. Once he found himself at the counter but then, suddenly, as he reached his hand out to take the food the man behind the counter was handing him, he found himself near the end of the line again.

The breakfast he got when he finally reached the counter was remarkably complete, eggs bacon, toast, pancakes, orange juice, milk and coffee. He sat down but before he ate much of his food the gangly man who had been involved in the dispute in the hall walked over and stood beside him.

“Neither do I,” the man said, out of the blue.

Strayte looked at him puzzled. “Neither do I what?”

“Like the eggs. Neither am I.”

“Neither am I what,” Strayte asked.

“Schizoid.”

Strayte stared at him with a bewildered look on his face.

“Oh,” the man said, “you’re new. No one told you. They never tell you anything even if you’re on the staff. And they never give you instructions on how to maintain order,” he said mimicking Nurse G. “Interesting information. It should be worth something to you. What do you have to trade?”

“I don’t have anything to trade,” Strayte said.

“Of course you do. You have a full head of hair. You have that nice white uniform. You might even be wearing underwear. You have a lot to trade, and that’s not even considering the important things like your kidney’s or your heart or your eyes or your sister or your brother or your mother. Did you grow up in a broken home?”

“No,” Strayte said.

“Well, then you see. A lot of people grew up in broken homes. They would give almost anything for memories of a mother and a father screaming and fighting like normal mothers and fathers do. You could trade your intact home for one of their broken homes. Not the homes of course, the memories. I wouldn’t recommend it, though, not if you don’t like the eggs.”

“What’s the information?” Strayte asked a little roughly. “We can arrive at some price for it later.”

The man thought about it for a moment.” It’s not the way I usually do business.” He took out a pad and stared at it for a moment. “Well, they’re giving me their toast to find out if you’re really a doctor and if you are, what kind of doctor, so I guess that will cover my overhead. But you’ve got to tell me first which of the things on your plate you did like. Did you like the toast?” Strayte had taken a bite and didn’t like it at all.

“No,” he said, “I didn’t like to toast. Or the bacon or the cereal either, for that matter.” He thought for a moment. “I liked the O.J. though and the rolls aren’t bad.”

“Well,” the man delivered the information in a business like way, “they put things into the food. They put lithium into the eggs, antidepressants into the butter on the toast, stimulants into the coffee, depressants into the tea. The bacon is fried in Thorazine and there’s Pimozide in the cereal. They usually try something new in the pancakes. Then everybody takes their medicine. It’s Dr. Beeper’s idea.”

“What about the O.J.?” Strayte wanted to know.

“Oh they only put placebo’s into the O.J. And the rolls don’t usually have anything in them either. You may be a little neurotic but you’re probably not very sick are you? And you’re a doctor too,” he said in amazement. “You are a doctor aren’t you?”

Strayte nodded.

The man in the oval spectacles stood up. “I can see you’re not eating your toast.”

“I’m really not very hungry anymore,” Nick Strayte replied.

“ Well, if you really don’t want it, may I,” he asked reaching for the pieces of toast. Strayte looked at the food counter. There was a big pile of toast available for the asking.” Sure,” Strayte said.

“ How are the eggs?”

“I really don’t have much of an appetite,” he said. “If you want them take them.”

“I couldn’t just take them,” the gangly, bespectacled man responded. “But how about some more O.J.? Most of the people here don’t like the O.J. They say it has no flavor.”

“Sure,” Strayte said, “O.J. would be fine.” There was a tray of O.J. on the counter next to the toast.

“And the potatoes. Would you like some more potatoes?”

“I’m not going to eat the potatoes, I have,” he said.

“Well I could take them off your hands too. “Fine,” the man said, “we have a deal.” He skipped back to his table with the eggs, potatoes and toast then returned with three glasses of O.J..

Nick Strayte watched him work his way up and down the row of tables trading. He ate very little and the place in front of his seat overflowed with portions of the breakfast. By the time breakfast was over the table in front of his seat was piled high with food. He pushed the glasses back on his nose, pulled out a little book. He licked the butter off a couple of portions of toast, wrote in some figures and took a sip of coffee and waited.

After a few minutes Strayte saw the far door of the kitchen open and two men looking like homeless derelicts drifted in, wandering down the aisle until they came to the place where the trader with his pile of plates on the table waited.

The first reached into his coat and drew out a book, its paper cover half ripped. The second provided a hand held video game. “No batteries,” he acknowledged “but I’ve played it. It works.”

“O.K.,” the man who had negotiated with Strayte said. “Today wasn’t all that great on this end either.” He stuffed the book and the game under his arm, shoved a roll into his mouth and moved away leaving the two homeless men to fill the bag they had brought.

He sucked on the roll and examined the balance sheet for the day’s transactions. He remembered the deal he had struck with the man in hospital whites. It was a good deal for both of them, information for food. It was a very modern deal. But he had tried to read the man’s desire as he negotiated with him and it was close to a cipher as desire could be.

Chapter 11

What God really wanted to forbid He made physically impossible to do.

When the mob came and set fire to his lab because he was using fetal material in genetic engineering experiments his parents were in the front of the crowd. Edward Tull was not displeased. It was the first time his parents had paid any attention to his work.

As he watched the group struggle with the police he remembered a conversation with his father. “Success is easy to define, son. Success is staying still most of the day.” His father was a truck driver. He delivered milk in the morning and bread in the afternoon. At night sometimes he delivered beer and wine. Later, when Edward Tull was in high school his father drove a sixteen wheeler but while he was in public school his father was always home by 4:20.

Each day when he came home from his routes he reviewed his sons day in school and supervised his homework. He repeated how important school was but the message never seemed to get through to the boy. He could not do any of the homework that his son had been assigned. He had dropped out of school in the 6th grade. But he harassed his son to search for the correct answer. To encourage his father Edward often pretended not to know the answers to problems that he had already worked out in his head. To both of their credit the father never caught on to what the son was doing.

His father wanted his boy to own a store or at least work in a store. Education was the key to achieving either goal. His son disappointed him. Even after Edward Tull became Dr. Edward Tull and started working in a prestigious lab the father held out hope that some day he would open a store. By the time Dr. Edward Tull started his own lab and was rumored to be a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize in Biology, his father had lost hope and interest.

Edward Tull was interested in everything but seemed to work him self into knots about with questions that drove his father crazy. “Why don’t rocks fuck?”

“Because they are not animals. Animals fuck not rocks,” he told the boy amazed at the youngster’s obtuseness.

“Why are numbers, numbers and not letters or sounds?”

His father grunted. “What kind of question is that? Numbers are numbers.”

“But why not sounds?”

Occasionally his father would hit him out of frustration. His father said almost nothing when his son set fire to the garage and only grunted when he flooded the basement. But his persistent deflection of homework by demanding answers to meaningless questions drove his father to distraction and domestic violence. His father would listen and attempt to deal with his questions for a while. Then, as his son spiraled into a glut of endless whys the father would get up, take aim at a place on his head and strike out. The boy always knew it was coming and where it would land. He never resented his father hitting him. He took it as a sign of loving and caring and as evidence that he was really on to something.

Even with all of his father’s help and attention he did not do well in school. In high school after the scandal, his father resigned himself to his son’s ultimate failure and started the process of getting him into the union.

His mother, who was uninterested in school, found his questions profound and interesting. Her child was a genius. She pointed out to him stories in the National Inquirer that dealt with strange and mysterious happenings. She believed in the spirit world, in messages from the past, in witches, in telepathy, in mediums, in Elvis Presley and aliens. She hoped that her son could trace their intricate connections back to their roots in Gods mysterious plan for running the universe.

Both of his parents were very religious. They were fundamentalists who belonged to a local sect, The Downside Dravidians. They believed in the creation just as the bible set it down, although his mother believed that aliens had a part in it. His father sought out evidence from the bible that hinted that the best thing a person could do in life was work in a store. But like school, which provoked grotesque questions, religion had a negative effect on Edward Tull.

After years of weekly services and sermons Edward Tull became persuaded somehow that God was unimaginative. He tortured his parents with this particular blasphemy. By the time he was a sophomore in high school he believed he could rectify this inadequacy. He proceeded to try to create a more diverse and varied inventory of animals by trying to impregnate every living creature he could lay his hands on. He tried to screw rabbits, hamsters, chickens, goats, sheep cats and dogs. There was no living creature that was immune from his sexual predations.

He was repelled by the very idea of fucking these animals. He derived no pleasure from it. He did it for science and to show God up. When all of his experiments failed, he thought he might be impotent. To test out the hypotheses he tried to impregnate his girlfriend who had just turned fourteen and had her first period. He succeeded the first try. She had an abortion, and, after his sordid history was revealed, he and his family were asked to leave the church.

All in all, when he reviewed his childhood he thought about it as unhappy.

His childhood ended about the time he bumbled into college. He began his college career majoring in religion. He felt he had to learn more about God’s limitations than he had grasped from his sorrowful personal experiences. But in the survey course in biology that all sophomores were required to take, he was astounded to find out that others had figured out a way to do what he had sacrificed his childhood well being and peace of mind to accomplish. He switched his major to biology.

After he graduated, he went to medical school then proceeded to get a Ph.D. in microbiology. Once he discovered what he wanted to do, school became a minor exercise for him. He passed his courses with little effort because all of it made sense. He saw the fundamentals more clearly than his professors because he identified them immediately as the limits God’s constricted imagination had imposed on living creatures.

He plodded along delighted in his challenge to God’s limitations. He capped off a notoriously successful career by winning the Nobel Prize in Biology. Then, violating very rigid prohibitions about gene splicing, he returned to the project he had undertaken as an adolescent. He tried to implant a human gene for intelligence or one of the many genes he had found for different intelligences, in every species he could think of.

Neither failure nor famed shielded him from the wrath of colleagues or the public and he was as defrocked as a scientist could be; he was ceremoniously stripped of his Nobel prize, unceremoniously tossed out of the lab he had created, prohibited from practicing medicine—which he had never done—and forbidden to apply for a government grant for the rest of his natural life. He was castigated and vilified. He did receive a visit however from a Japanese firm, a gear manufacturer who was interested in branching out into the bio tech field. He considered their offer then refused it.

The turmoil had very little effect on him except to lead him to decide to look secretly for a place which would give him the freedom and peace of mind to think about the mysterious barriers God had put in the path of anyone more creative than He was to prevent them from improving on his handiwork.

After the fire at his laboratory in which he was believed by the authorities to have died, he looked hard and long for a suitable place to continue his work. He found Vermeers and vanished without a trace. Vermeers met his requirements perfectly. He was able to spend most of his day curled up in a wheel chair, contemplating God’s cunningness and figuring out how he could circumvent it.

After breakfast Nurse G wended her way between patients like a Titanic who had received a radiogram about icebergs in her vicinity. A compass tuned to lunacy kept her at exactly the angle and distance necessary for a safe passage through dangerous waters. She was keeping order Strayte decided.

He walked over to the couch to sit for a moment. He had assumed most of the jobs of the absent day staff. The tension in his neck told him it was a cumbersome and confusing physical job, As he sat down on the couch to rest for a moment he felt her shift her direction and head toward him. He felt her coming like a fighter pilot feels a missile streaking toward him: a flickering message in his brain told him trouble on its way.

She hurled herself directly at him then veered suddenly and vectored to the man sitting on the couch next to Strayte’s.

“Mr.Dorsey stop it, stop it this minute.” Strayte swung around and watched the man on the couch next to him shrivel and collapse like a blow up doll suddenly emptied of air.

“Why did you let him do that?” she yelled at Strayte.

“Do what?” Strayte asked innocently. It was an innocence born of complete ignorance of what the man on the neighboring couch was doing. On the basis of the result Strayte thought that the man had been guilty of no more than sucking in more air than was allotted him.

Nurse G would have none of it. “He’s a chameleon. He makes himself look like other people. If you let him practice doing it,” she said it as if the name for what he was doing was unmentionable, “tomorrow, people won’t be able to tell you and him apart. Its disgusting and disorderly” She was repelled by it, whatever it was that she was talking about.

She turned to the figure who had straightened up and began to tilt as Nurse G tilted.

“If you start that again,” she screamed as the man began to take on the posture of someone delivering a severe reprimand, “I’ll take away your television privileges for a week.”

Nick Strayte saw the man hesitate then give in to the impulse. For a second he was Nurse G. He took on her appearance from the smear of anger on her face and the angle of her head to the slightly crossed appearance of her feet. It was like watching a living cartoon whose slight exaggerations made it more real than what it mimicked. The display lasted only a fraction of a second, then the man was off bouncing against walls and off of himself. “Mostly he stands against the wall and imitates furniture,” Nurse G said. “He’s almost invisible but at least it’s a little more orderly.”

“I never saw him,” was the only thing Nick Strayte could say.

“You never do. Now I’ve forgotten why I wanted to see you.” She turned on her heels and strode off in the direction she had come. As she moved back to her station Strayte heard a chant beginning from the patients around him. A mumble at first, it took on substance and shape as it continued. “Cricket’s walk” the words seemed to say, although some patients used the occasion to say other things. “Mr. Cricket for his walk,” finally emerged as the consensus statement. Strayte saw Nurse G stop in her tracks and wheel again. She retraced her steps toward him without the last minute detour.

“I remembered. It’s time to take Mr. Cricket for his walk,” she stated against the Greek chorus behind her. She wheeled again and swept herself toward station. “Come with me,” she yelled over her shoulder. Strayte got up and followed her.

Nurse G set out knitting and purling her way through corridors and hallways to the sun room. “There’s Mr. Cricket.” She pointed to a lump of flesh deposited like a pile of meringue on a wheelchair. “He needs to be taken for a walk.”

The thing on the wheelchair looked dead. His clouded eyes were open as if he were scanning the landscape in front of him trying to bring into focus an ominous, amorphous shape that loomed large in front of him.

Strayte looked at him curiously trying to figure out how to grab hold of the bundle so he could set him on his feet. “How do I grab hold of him?”

“No,” Nurse G admonished gently. “Just push his wheelchair.”

Strayte went around to the back of the wheelchair which was caked with dirt and mud.

“Just push him out and walk him around for a while. It will give you a chance to rest too,” she said sarcastically.

“Where?” he asked Nurse G who was striding back to her station. She pointed in front of her and executed a swift precise turn on her heels.

“The doors are all the way at the far end of the wing, over there.” She pointed in the direction from which they had just come.

“What’s wrong with him?” Strayte asked?

“What isn’t?” Nothing works right. Drugs,” she said quietly, “probably too many drugs. He worked in a laboratory,” she stated.

“He looks like a larva in menopause” Strayte commented.

Nurse G grabbed his shoulder “Be careful,” she whispered. “He understands everything.”

“What can he understand?” he Nick Strayte thought to himself. “O.K., Mr. Cricket we’re off to the races,” he said and positioned himself behind the steel handles of the wheel chair and pushed off.” I expect you can’t tell me why they call you Mr. Cricket, can you. And what are you staring at with those turbid eyes?”

Until it found a stable position, the ball of silly putty on the chair wobbled around as if he were going to roll off the chair. The bouncing of the ride opened him up like a flower in time lapse photography. A croaking came from silly putty on the chair.

“Well it’s a start,” Strayte said merrily. They had reached to doors out of the ward. As soon they moved outside, into the air, a transformation of the amorphous shape on the chair began to take place. The lump of misshapen flesh began to fill out. It took on the rough shape of an old man.

Strayte did not notice the transformation. All of his attention was devoted to trying to move the chair into the ruts in the ground worn by previous trips the wheelchair had made toward the center of the meadow.

When they settled in, he tried to think how he would like to be entertained if he were in the bundle’s shape. He recited all of the limericks he knew and made up lines where his memory failed him. When he was finished with the coarse poetry the only entertainment he could think of were passages from the Upanishads about death rising.

Another wing of the hospital loomed in the distance. Between it and the ward they had just left was a meadow complete with a stand of oak and popular, what looked like a hut and a pen or corral. He sucked in his breath. It was beautiful, twice as much for being unexpected. Mr. Cricket’s wheelchair had worn a path that could be followed to the middle of the meadow where a slight rise obscured its continuation.”I can see you’ve been here before,” he said to the occupant of the chair who had begun to resemble a human being.

Strayte did not pay attention to the changing apparition in the wheelchair. The grounds of Vermeers were like another world, as if something had stopped civilization in its tracks. It was as if some force had tucked away a place nature could keep as her own, insisting a meadow stay a meadow. The middle of the grassy plain rose as if a dividing line had been drawn to distinguish the boundary between two worlds.

“It’s downhill soon, Mr. Cricket,” Strayte said merrily not taking his eyes off the landscape. Unnoticed, the thing in the wheelchair had become a well defined dignified man of sixty, clear eyed and purposeful.

Suddenly just as he reached beginning of the rise the tracks made by previous trips of the wheelchair stopped. Strayte stopped.

“You can leave me here for a while—three hours or so” a clear voice from the chair said. It was as much a command as a suggestion.

Strayte had worked hard pushing the wheelchair. He was not in good shape. He needed to rest. He found himself an undisturbed space away from the tracks of the wheelchair and flopped down on the ground. He surveyed the grounds again. “It’s wonderful,”he said exuberantly. “I never knew such a place like this could exist in the city.” He rested, luxuriating in the freshness of the air and the undisturbed expanse of grass around him.

The contrast between Vermeers on the inside and Vermeers on the outside disturbed him. He sprawled out and stuck a piece of grass in his mouth to think about it. He turned to the wheelchair. “How come the patients don’t use…” There was no one to ask. The wheelchair was empty.

“Shit, half a morning as a doctor and I’ve lost a patient already,” he said to himself out loud. What he was going to tell the nurse who ran the ward. I’d better find him is what I better tell her, he said as he got up.

He thought for a minute. Nothing had gone by him so Mr. Cricket was either lying on the ground thrashing somewhere ahead of him or he had made his way to the building over the rise. Embarrassment at his carelessness made Strayte hurry. When he made his way over the rise there was no thrashing body on the ground. He broke into a run and for the closest structure, a boxy knob at the end of the long run of brick that angled off from the spine of the hospital.

There was a faded sign on the door. ‘Urine Specimens from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.. EKG’s from noon to 3 p.m. Do not enter.’ Strayte pushed against it.

The door gave way easily. Instead of the dirty, abandoned analytic facility he expected, he found himself in spotless, a brightly lit modern laboratory. In the middle of a ring of tables holding test tubes, balances, electronic gear, microscopes and computers was a regenerated Mr. Cricket. He was now a well formed, distinguished human being of sixty or so. Around him, four people in white laboratory coats jostled to present him with notebooks and get his attention.

They were all speaking at once. “The junction at site sixteen seems to be the receptor for the piece we are looking for.”

“The stain linkage is working but…”

“Kinase does not seem to be working and the time is short by some magnitudes, 1.5 or 6,” the third man added.

The four assistants with Mr. Cricket at their center moved past Strayte. “I’ve been thinking about it for the last four days,” Mr. Cricket said, “and I think we’re barking up the wrong tree. The segments should be marked more distinctively and they should be associated with something on No.16.” Out of the babble one of the white coated men pushed his voice up.”Doesn’t follow. The residues don’t say, I mean it could be…”

Startled by the unexpected scene in front of him Strayte stood motionless. It didn’t make any sense. Strayte tried to assert himself. “Look, could someone explain…?”

Mr. Cricket looked at him. The look was intense and imperative, but not unkind. “Don’t concern yourself. This is a madhouse remember. I’ll be here for three hours or so. You can go back if you want. Tell them you left me sitting in the meadow. That’s what everyone else who walks me does. If you want to you can sit and watch. You can put your head down and rest if you want. Just stay out of the way.”

Strayte was insistent. “I was supposed to walk you. What is this place? What’s going on?” The group of five pulled their attention away from him and resumed babbling and passing notes between themselves.

Strayte hesitated. Vermeers was a madhouse. He had done what he had been told to do. He relaxed and tried to figure out just what kind of work they were doing. By the apparatus it looked like a cross between biology, biochemistry and something else he could not identify. He went out again and found himself a spot in front of the building and sprawled out again on the ground. After a while he came back into the lab and cleaned off a chair and a corner of a desk that seemed least cluttered and put his head down and slept for a while.

When he woke up he asked one of the laboratory workers who was shaking a test tube, “Who is Mr. Cricket?”

“Oh,” the technician laughed quietly, “Dr. Edward Tull.”

Strayte remembered. He had heard him lecture years before at the college. It was a lecture on the future of genetic engineering and its consequences. Strayte thought at the time the man was drawing an exaggerated picture of the effects that could be expected from the technology. At the end of the lecture he and the speaker had argued furiously, but the man made a convincing argument. Dr. Tull who had won a Nobel prize for his work in gene splicing had been at the center of scandal. He had violated the regulations that almost every government in the world had established on whose genes you could put where. In the middle of disciplinary proceedings religious fanatics had burned down his lab and he disappeared. Dr. Tull had supposedly died in the fire and the explosion which followed.

Three hours later Mr. Cricket tapped him on the shoulder.

“It’s home Dr. Strayte. That is your name, isn’t it?” His assistants stood at attention again. “Good Afternoon, Dr. Tull,” they said.

Strayte walked with him to the wheelchair and the distinguished man sat down. “I can depend on you to keep my little secret. You are a doctor of some kind aren’t you. I vaguely seem to remember you at a lecture I gave once. You asked about…. I can’t remember. It doesn’t harm Vermeers. The hospital doesn’t use the lab any more. Politics, I expect. And they don’t let patients out into the meadow anymore because…they run off and they’re hard to catch and bring back. Anyway, everyone believes it’s haunted. By the way,” he said, “this is the way the limericks go.” He filled in the lines Strayte had forgotten. “As for the Upanishads, well, I guess you had the idea right.” He started humming. “Stop” he said to Strayte and when the chair stopped he extended his arm and opened his hand. After a moment something flew into it.

By the time they had covered half of the way back to the ward Dr. Edward Tull started to shrivel again. Three quarters of the way to the main wing of the hospital he slumped down in his chair and by the time they reached the doors he was a formless mass again. When Strayte pushed him into the main sun room the patients gathered around. They pried the lump of flesh’s hand open carefully and watched in delight as the cricket resting on the flatulent palm hesitated for a moment then flew out and leapt around the room.

Chapter 12

Money is always in heat

Martin Mash never had enough money. He could not figure out why.

Making money was all he thought about. He hadn’t always been that way. Not always; only since he turned thirteen. When he plunged into adolescence, an interest in money accompanied him into heat.

He tried to strike the same balance his grandfather had between making money and giving money away but he couldn’t. He tried to keep the balance his father had maintained between making money and spending money. He failed at that also. Only making money interested him.

Martin Mash’s father had been on the board of the Vermeers’ Foundation, the charitable organization that ran the hospital and his father’s father had been on the board. There had always been a Mash on the Vermeers’ board—and on more than one occasion, in the hospital too. They served without pay, for nothing, free, as a public service.

Of course his family had made a lot of money from the hospital and he could see the benefits of public service. All of the supplies for the hospital were provided at inflated prices by firms members of his family controlled. But it still seemed like charity to him.

He had decided a long time ago that charity was not his strong suit. The only question was how to exploit his position. When he graduated law school Martin Mash’s father offered him the position of president of the board of the foundation. Martin Mash turned it down. He preferred to be hired for pay as the board’s lawyer, a position his father also held pro bono. Martin Mash realized that as lawyer for the board he could command a frightfully good salary without doing much work, and with a good paralegal, no work at all. His father thought it was short sighted but decided that his son was young and would mature soon enough.

When his father died, Martin Mash persuaded the board not to elect a new president but to keep his father as president, in absentia, so to speak. Since he was the board’s lawyer and was closer to his father than anyone else, and he communicated his father’s wishes to the other members of the board who were all men in their 80’s. Although his father was still de facto president of the board, everyone, including himself, thought of Martin Mash as head of Vermeers. There had been changes though.

When his father died there was some moaning in the community that the board was too white and too male so they had invited a Black women who had worked in the hospital for twenty-five years to serve on the board. Her appointment had quieted the criticism for a while, although for some reason, perhaps because besides being black she was old and crippled, Martin Mash thought of her as potential trouble.

Martin Mash spent his apprenticeship on the board trying to figure out how he could make money from his public service.

At first he thought he might use his ancestors technique. But the way his father and grandfather had used the board—by making sure that it purchased its supplies at inflated prices from companies that they controlled or were run by their family—was closed to him. His relatives already completely monopolized the hospital’s suppliers.

The family collectively had grown rich but money had never come to his grandfather or father directly. It came instead in the form of exorbitant Christmas presents like a years supply of Chateau Lafayette or forty boxes of Monte Christo’s at Christmas time. He had grown distant from the relatives whose companies were enriched by the board’s policy. Only his uncle Seymour continued to provide end of the year bounty to him and he was almost dead and he was sure that his cousin Seymour Jr. would stop the practice when Seymour Sr. died.

As his apprenticeship was drawing to a close Martin Mash realized that since he controlled the board he could control the trust fund of the hospital. While it was both illegal and immoral to actually embezzle money from the hospital he could use the hospital’s money to generate money.

With the bulk of the hospitals trust fund moving in front of him like a battleship, driving the prices of something—he was not sure about what yet—up and down, creating waves of highs and lows, he could paddle calmly in its wake netting money. The question was, of course, prices of what.

The fund was large. But it was not large enough to move the price of pork bellies or copper significantly. For two years he had thought and thought about it, doing nothing more than taking an addition fee from the hospital as financial consultant.

In the end art saved him. His cousin asked him for help settling a law suit. “She said she found glass in her pizza,” his cousin complained.

“Who’s she?”

“The customer who is suing the pizzeria.”

“Did she?”

“Probably,” his cousin said. “But she was the only customer who complained. Something broke. We ran out of hot pepper. Who noticed? The chains are killing me. I need help.”

In the course of negotiating a settlement with the woman who was suing his cousin he found out that her boyfriend was an artist. Martin Mash was generous with his cousin’s insurance company’s money and in gratitude the woman gave him a painting. It was a small landscape in the style of early Picasso. He immediately tried to sell it but was offered a tiny bit of money which he rejected.

“Not worth much more than the canvas. It’s very good. Very, very good,” he said. “It really even smells like a Picasso. Of course if the painter were better known, even locally,” the gallery owner—who was also the local fence—had told him, “I could give you more.” Martin took the painting back and replaced the print of a child with big eyes he had in the bathroom with the early imitation Picasso. The encounter set him thinking.

The hospital’s trust fund was not large enough to move the price of pork bellies up or down a fraction of a fraction of a point. But judiciously used, it would move the prices of paintings up and down in tide-like heaves and he could trawl in the wake and make a fortune.

He set out looking for a suitable artist.

He managed to meet nearly all of the city’s painters but none of them seemed suitable for the operation he had in mind. While a number of them were interested in his proposition, some wanted more of a cut than he was willing to give them, and the few who agreed to the price he was willing to pay and the constraints he insisted upon, were too greedy to be trustworthy.

He was disappointed in the art world. It seemed filled with people who were only interested in eating regularly and staying warm, which he knew would be destructive to art in the style and scale he was interested in.

He was almost ready to abandon the idea and start to examine the market for semi legal drugs when he ran into the woman whose gift had started the idea going in the first place. She was eating pizza at his cousin’s again.

She listened to his proposition. “I’m sure he will agree to it,” she said. “In fact he doesn’t have to agree to it at all. I agree to it. He’s a little crazy,” she admitted. “Actually he’s almost entirely crazy but he paints like a demon. I help him,” she said, “most of the time he paints me. I feed him and I sell his paintings on the street. On a good day I can get oh, 20 dollars for a painting. And I usually sell at least one painting a day, on a good day.”

The description of the painter and her relationship to him fascinated him. He visited the painter’s studio. Her description understated the painter’s condition. Instead of shaking Martin Mash’s hand he painted his guest’s palm and pressed it against the painting he was making and painted around it.

Martin Mash liked his paintings. There was a fire to them and it didn’t matter which way they were hung, upside down or right side up. He didn’t know if they were art but they were oil on canvas which was close enough.

“It’s only a phase,” she explained. “He goes through phases. His style changes faster than a politician’s convictions. Actually you have to watch what he looks at because anything sharp is likely to change his style.” It was enough to convince Martin Mash that he had found what he was looking for.

Martin Mash called in a favor he was owed by an art critic who lived in New York, in Soho. He reminded him that he had not shown up for five years for the diagnostic examination that was required by his discharge as cured of impulses to molest toddlers.

He arranged for a simultaneous showing at the local gallery and a Soho gallery run by the critic’s mistress. He agreed to pay the artist’s girlfriend her 20 dollars a painting without her having to stand on the street for hours and he bought every painting the artist had in his studio, including the nineteen paintings designated for the shows he had arranged. It was a perfect deal.

Although only three of the sixteen member board were present, his eloquent and impassioned motion to use three quarters of the foundation’s endowment fund to purchase paintings of local artists as a culturally and socially useful investment was passed unanimously.

He was appointed the boards purchasing agent, and he began to juggle the price of the paintings by publically re-buying the entire exhibit at the local gallery and five of the paitings at the Soho gallery at inflated prices for the hospital. Then he made three of the paintings he owned available to another gallery in New York and put the screws on the art critic for an article in a prestigious art journal to whom the art critic was related by a liaison with the publisher.

The paintings sold at Soho prices to a speculator who was talked into buying them on the assurance of a rumor that the artist was going to receive a commission to paint a picture of Michael Jackson and Madonna screwing.

Martin Mash totaled his profits and it came to twice his salary as the lawyer for the hospital not including the bill he had submitted for his services as artistic consultant.

He thought about the thirteen other paintings he had in his basement and about the steady stream of paintings at 20 dollars a canvas he was entitled to. He was satisfied with himself. He was on his way to becoming a rich man.

Martin Mash had met a lot of people who were greedy but only a very few who shared his obsession in making it, hand over fist, jowl under cheek, finger before palm.

One of those people was the young psychiatrist the administrator had hired just before he had left on his tour of the worlds lunatic asylums. As the board’s lawyer Martin Mash had to approve the appointment of Peter Tiff for the job of part time assistant for the liver doctor who had become acting administrator and acting chief psychiatrist and acting chief medical officer. It was clear that the young psychiatrist had as much interest in doing psychiatry as Martin Mash had in practicing the law. He was interested in making money. The lawyer for the board approved him on the spot.

They hit it off immediately. Since then they had become good friends. They never went out socially because the young doctor had no social standing to speak of, and they never got together to watch a football game because both of them were too busy making money. But they thought about one another as best friends because they shared the same obsession.

Peter Triff spent as little time at the hospital as could. The liver doctor who ran the hospital complained about the young psychiatrist continuously. The acting administrator’s whining had increased recently. The fluctuations in the art market made the flow of cash funds for the day to day operation of the hospital erratic, which led more and more of the staff to quit.

When Martin Mash finally raised the issue obliquely with the young psychiatrist, the young doctor blamed it on his beeper. “My beeper goes off constantly,” he complained. “Emergencies.” He glared at the beeper expectantly. “Crazy people are crazy. The only thing they think of is themselves.” At that moment the beeper went off. He glanced at it. “See,” he said, “an emergency,” and the lawyer did not see him for two weeks.

When he did reappear in his office, Dr. Peter, as Martin Mash called him familiarly, made an interesting proposition. “ There’s something I wanted to raise with you. A proposition. You don’t have to make a decision now. Not even tomorrow. Maybe next week. Just think about it. It can make whoever buys in at the bottom floor at lot of money.”

Martin Mash immediately became preoccupied by the possibility of making money but he tried not to show to much interest.

“Like how?” was all he said.

“Well, I was thinking,” Peter Triff said. “The foundation that runs the hospital is wasting a lot of good money taking care of a lot of sick people who are poor, “he began. “None of them have any money because they’re poor, and they don’t have any prospect of making any because they are crazy. I haven’t seen so many totally crazy people in my whole life. And they don’t have any insurance.” The insurance was a sore point with Martin Mash so Peter Triff said it quietly.

“Now if the foundation closed the hospital and sold its assets—the land and buildings—to someone who might be interested, especially if they sold it at what it cost the foundation to buy the land and put up the buildings when the hospital was built, someone could make a lot of money. I mean if you opened another hospital, a modern private hospital with the most modern facilities for rich people and people with insurance.”

Martin Mash could not restrain himself. “There’s another hospital in town for crazy people with insurance. You work for it.” He could not mask the resentment in his voice.

“CTTL is modern but it’s old-fashioned modern but not modern modern. They make a lot of money,” he said thoughtfully, “but not hand over fist. That’s where the second part of the idea comes in. There’s really a huge amount of money in crazy people if they are handled right.” He could not restrain his enthusiasm. “Franchises. You could franchise mental hospitals. With computers and the right software you could…almost anyone could run a Loony Tunes hospital. You could have a Loony Tunes College and the people who wanted to buy a franchise could come and you would train them in a week how to run the computers and the software which you would sell them along with the supplies. Patients are easy to come by. Computers. A computer could diagnose the patients and you could hire a psychiatrist as a consultant for the whole chain for even less than I am making. The computer would do the billing, the computer could do the inventory, the computer could schedule medicines. You could get by with a skeleton crew.” He mounted the idea and soared. “You could take hotels that are used to house welfare recipients and make them into mental health centers. You would not even have to displace the current occupants just change the government agency that paid for them. The software would do it.”

“You could write off the mother hospital as a research and development center,” he continued. “I mean the money…” He calmed himself. “It would make a lot of money for the people who got in on the ground floor. It’s a new idea in the care of the lunatics. It would require a good lawyer of course.”

“It’s a very interesting idea,” Martin Mash said, “let me think about it for a minute.”

He thought about it for a minute.

He was already making a lot of money from the hospital and saw no good reason to be greedy when it might not bring him any more than he was ripping the hospital off for now.

He examined the young psychiatrist’s proposition from other angles. It was clearly skirting the boundary where the kind of legal work he did ended and the kind of legal work other lawyers did began. He would probably have to work at setting up a new corporation and he knew nothing about it. He would have to hire another lawyer and split the profits with him. The idea was distasteful. That did not bother him as much as the fact that the doctor would certainly make a lot more money than he himself would. There was no reason to be greedier than he was.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

Peter Triff looked disappointed. “Well, if that’s your final word why don’t you think about it a little more. You never can tell. Maybe you’ll see something attractive about it you didn’t see before.” He took out his beeper and stared at it for a while. When it didn’t go off he put it into his pocket and left.

That conversation left a sour taste in his mouth, not as sour a taste as the one that coated his tongue after the second conversation he had with the young psychiatrist a few weeks later.

“I think I have thought of a way of making that idea we talked about a few weeks ago more profitable to you,” Dr.Triff said after he made himself comfortable.

“Take your beeper off and leave it with my secretary,” Martin Mash insisted. “It interferes with my pacemaker.”

The young psychiatrist parted with his beeper without hesitation which made Martin Mash suspicious.

“I was thinking of…, mm art,” the young psychiatrist began. “I like art. I don’t only mean because it’s art and is wonderful because it’s art but because there’s a lot of money to be made in art.”

Martin Mash began to have a bad feeling about the line that Peter Triff was developing.

“I mean if someone were to buy a lot of painting not only because he liked the artist and they gave him a feeling about the world he liked, but also because they might go up up up in value and he would make a lot of money, a lot of money, well I think that man would really be smart. Of course that’s the short term.”

Martin Mash tensed up.

“I mean especially if you know the price of the artists masterpieces were rising because some institution, let’s say, like a lunatic asylum was being used to move the price around I mean like buying and selling paintings to move the price up and then selling to drive the price down. Of course if this man had a connection with the artist that would help and if he had a favorite critic who for some reason, I mean beside the fact that he really liked the artist’s work, could keep the interest in the artist up, it would be really a money machine.

Of course that is in the short run, the very short run. I mean you couldn’t quite count on it. I mean what if for some reason it came out about the critic and the hallowed community institution whose endowment was being used to manipulate—I guess you could use that term—the price of paintings, the air would come out of the bubble as fast as a fart from a mountain frog. I mean you couldn’t quite count on it for certain. And if someone who was unhappy, someone who knew about the arrangement bought a few paintings, like nine paintings, for twenty-two dollars apiece a piece on the street and sold them…”

Martin Mash saw the light. He was furious but he maintained his lawyer’s composure. “You shit,” he screamed. “How do you know, how did you find out? The damned cunt of a girlfriend double crossed me,” he squealed. He calmed down once the outburst was over and he caught his breath. “You know Peter,” he said, “I’ve thought about your idea about franchising lunatic asylums. I really thought about it and after thinking about it I think it’s a pretty good idea, almost foolproof. It is almost foolproof isn’t it?”

The young doctor relaxed. “Beats jerking off the art market I can tell you that.” In Martin Mash’s secretary’s office a beeper went off. “Well, he said, “I’m glad that’s settled. Get the board to agree to sell the hospital. It will take a couple of weeks for us to unload our paintings. I’ll fill you in on the details later. Emergency. Sorry,” and he walked straight and tall out of Mash’s office.

The conversation the next day with Dr. Heirath was shorter and left an even sourer taste in his mouth. The doctor had come to see him to ask for more money.

“I’m running out of money to run the hospital. The operating account is almost empty,” he complained.

“There’s a financial crunch,” the lawyer answered,” it will be cleared up in a little while. A cash flow problem.”

“Shit,” the doctor said. “You’ve just been screwing around with the endowment.”

Martin Mash knew it was only an angry guess. “Look,” he said soothingly. “I know things have been a little hard for you as acting administrator and acting chief of psychiatric services. But…”

The liver doctor was furious. “But nothing you asshole. The staff hasn’t been paid in a week. Put some money into the operating fund.” He turned to go out.

“Perhaps, perhaps,” the lawyer said “if the hospital were run more efficiently. Maybe doing all of the jobs…”

The doctor swore at him again. “You haven’t the least idea of what goes on. You haven’t set foot there since I became acting administrator and acting chief medical officer and acting psychiatric director. “You bastards are ripping off the hospital for…”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Martin Mash answered soothingly. “Perhaps we could get some more money into the account,” he conceded. “But…” He offered the doctor a drink. “There’s another matter I wanted to take up with you. It’s a little delicate.” The doctor screwed up his face.

“What would you say to closing the hospital? There’s the possibility, only the possibility mind you, of selling the facility off. The corporation to whom the hospital would be sold would probably build a new facility, another Loony tunes facility but for profit, perhaps part of a franchised system of hospitals. The board would put its money into a new project the members are thinking about. Pornography. It’s the scourge of our times. Much worse than a little craziness.” He ad-libbed the new project although once the idea came to him he saw that it solved a few sticky problems. He could probably keep the foundation that ran the hospital intact and keep up his salary as a lawyer and still let him use more money to keep the art scam going. Perhaps he could find another artist and run two. He made note to do some calculations. “You could get in on the bottom floor. It would certainly mean a raise—a small raise at first perhaps but…”

“What would happen to the patients in the hospital?” the acting administrator asked.

Martin Mash thought about it a while. “Well the ones that had good insurance policies we could transfer to the new hospital, which at first would be the old hospital but later would be a new hospital. “

“None of the patients have insurance, good or otherwise,” Dr. Heirath barked, “and you know it.”

“Well we could discharge them as cured. It would add to the hospital’s luster to have cured…”

Dr. Heirath put down his drink. “You prick,” he screamed. “Up yours.” And he stormed out.

Chapter 13

Big things change because people are too smart for their own good. Little things change because they are not smart enough.

When the telegram was slipped under Haddy Washington’s door, she worried. Her anxiety wasn’t helped by the struggle she had to go through to open it, holding it in under the one arm that was completely useless and maneuvering the knife she held with the other rebellious arm that did what she wanted only slowly and reluctantly. At first she thought something had happened to one of her grandchildren.

But in the midst of her fretting she realized that her son or her daughter would have brought such news in person or called the preacher and he would have come, sorrow faced and slack, shuffling along like some caricature of a black person. Then she remembered that telegrams meant that there was a meeting of the board of Vermeers and that she hadn’t gotten one for a long time.

She knew that she was their token. A bad joke. She couldn’t quite make out which token she was. She was black, she was a woman and she was disabled. She had read a report the board had submitted to some agency that they had a disabled person on the board and a black and a woman and she was puzzled until she realized that they had counted her three times.

They were jiving her. They always jived her. They needed her demographics. There was a sizeable check each year for her service on the board. It paid for a lot of extras she couldn’t afford. It paid for a neighbor’s burial, gifts for the grandchildren especial Mabel, who liked things her parents wouldn’t spend money for. Neither her son, who was doctor and just starting a practice, nor her daughter, who was married to one, were poor the way she was poor when she was their age, but they were ambitious and it led them to move money around in funny ways so that their kids felt deprived. She took the edge off it. Not big gifts but right to the point what they wanted. No argument that it was unnecessary, no quick dismissal that it was extravagant. Each time she gave them one, Haddy Washington wished that she had had a grandmother like herself.

She had gotten by—more than gotten by. In the end that she had gotten the gold ring. People asked her what it was like serving on the board of Vermeers. She said it was like a funeral except the mourners were dead and the corpse barely alive. And the dead ones like the lawyer and the young psychiatrist didn’t know they were dead. They loved one another those two, the lawyer and the young psychiatrist. One was worse than the other. The lawyer was the chief gangster. He was ripping off the hospital for what it was worth but of course she didn’t know how exactly. The young doctor was another piece of work. Smooth assed, he was hatching things in his head, dark, evil, splintery things all the time. He was always measuring, drawing lines, checking angles. She could feel it. But he hadn’t had no opportunity yet. She could tell that too. But he was waiting, sitting on his evil eggs, hatching.

Besides herself, the only alive person who ever came to board meetings was the poor liver doctor, Dr. Heirath, who had the burden heaped on his shoulder of running the whole thing—and he stopped coming because the dead men treated him like they treated her, meaning, as if he wasn’t there. The few members of the board who came regularly, came for the meal that was served. They hadn’t the least idea what was going on. After Dr. Heirath stopped going to the meetings she stopped going too, but the check kept coming which was good enough for her.

She didn’t care all that much for the hospital. Not now, when she was on the board or over the years when she worked there. The poor souls stuck there, they were another matter. Them she cared about. She had been one of them for a bit. But there was not much she could do for them, much as she wanted to.

When she and Morris got married, before they had the kids, she went to work at Vermeers as a cleaning lady. She tried to get them to hire her as an aide but she had never learned to read or write and that was the end of it. She worked at nights although she would have preferred days because nights didn’t leave too much of a life but she didn’t complain. After the kids were in school she went back and they put her on evenings again. One evening she went to work and during the night they called her to come home but by the time she got there there was nothing but cinders and smoke from the fire that took Morris and her youngest. What saved her older two children was that they were at an aunts baby sitting. Later that evening she went back to Vermeers crazy and lived in the hospital for four months instead of cleaning it.

When she got out of the hospital, she fetched her two kids from her sister who had kept them and decided she would just have to stay coldish sane, however hard it was with the pain of the pictures jumbled around in her head.

She decided that with Morris gone she would have to look out for herself because just cleaning wasn’t going to get her mind no stability nor provide for the kids what she had decided they should have when she and Morris got married. She thought to do some business.

It was a risk her sanity had to take. She scrimped and saved and borrowed from her brother and used Morris’s insurance to get started. Her mother had given her a recipe, a root medicine that she used to cure acne pimples. She bottled it and sold it as a skin cream. She couldn’t read or write but her cousins helped her and the business did pretty well. After a little while it did better than well. Black people were fonder of their skin than white folks.

As her business grew she added a set of hair lotions and some medicines for ailments that black people seemed to have but white folks never admitted to. She hired a smart assed black stallion in a suit and tie who had an MBA and he ran the business. It was a soft life she had had for a while and sanity was no problem at all. Then the stallion ran off and she found that he had been skimming the business and left it in debt.

At fifty-three she went back to being a cleaning lady at Vermeers. She thought a little about going crazy again and decided it wouldn’t help at all. The kids were finished with schooling and starting out on their own, married and doing medicine. They offered to set her up in an apartment and take care of her but she turned them down. Vermeers kept her because as old as she was, she worked harder than most of the younger people who worked there who were all friends of the lawyer’s family who ran the hospital.

At sixty-two she got ready to retire. Her arm was giving her trouble and the doctors had told her she would probably loose any use of it pretty soon. At sixty-seven she quit. Enough was enough.

She had worked there twenty five years altogether and no one said goodby. No one.

Then out of the blue, three years after she had retired, someone from the board called and asked her to come back. She thought they were offering her her job back as cleaning lady again. She thought about it for a while then she refused. When they explained that it was as a member of the board and that it paid her just to come to meeting which she didn’t have to come to if she didn’t feel up to it she realized she was being used. There had been grumbling in town about how the board was all white and male and she realized that she was going to be their token female, token black and token disabled person because by then she had lost any use of her left arm, but she took it anyway. It didn’t make a difference.

At first she went to meetings regularly but they didn’t seem to notice she was there. She didn’t expect any more, but a check came twice a year and it was about as much as she made before she retired as a cleaning lady. She realized it was small change to the doddering fools that served on the board but it was like winning the lottery and it didn’t matter that she was an invisible token.

When she got the telegram about the meeting of the board, she knew there was something dirty going on. She knew it. Meetings were in the fall and spring. This one wasn’t scheduled.

It was raining. She had read all of the bulletins the church had sent her this month. She had looked at the album of pictures of her grandchildren twice. There was nothing in the fridge worth thinking about. She decided to go, just to quiet the boredom.

She knew for certain that there was something sneaky in the works when they greeted her as her nephew pushed her wheelchair into the board room. For the first time she had been allowed to use the elevator instead of being forced to haul herself up on the long staircase the way she usually did.

The jive assed lawyer for the hospital, Martin Mash, called the meeting to order.

“Glad you could all make this meeting. “ She looked around. Almost the whole board was there. The young psychiatrist hung to the side making himself inconspicuous, drooping in his chair like an thin, elegant weed. He was clutching something wrapped in a handkerchief in his hand, squeezing it.

Someone she knew was a patient at the hospital went around serving them coffee and snacks. He looked like a waiter, he fluttered around like a waiter. He was for alltold a waiter. His gestures looked like he had polished them for years in cafes and restaurants. He walked around with a plate of little pieces of doughy things and coffee. “Would you like some Truffle pate?” he asked. It looked like peanut clusters to her but she took one. The coffee was strong and bitter the way she liked it. After the waiter finished he found himself a spot in the corner and disappeared almost. He looked like a piece of furniture. A madhouse, Haddy remembered, a madhouse.

The meeting had the air of dying about it. She thought that one of the important old cockers had died and they called the meeting to acknowledge it; A meeting of the dead to acknowledge death. Her wheelchair was only one of a crowd. She looked around for the liver doctor but he wasn’t there.

“You know,” the lawyer said “times have changes.” A few of the old men grunted. Most were dozing off.

“We haven’t had a proper chairman since my father died,” he continued. “In his temporary absence as the board’s lawyer I have thought a lot and hard about what the foundation that supports Vermeers is getting for its money. The patient load is down. The new hospital in town provides, not better care than we do, but certainly more of it. “

“If you got insurance,” Haddy mumbled, “for white folk.”

“And the city hospital has facilities for the poor,” the lawyer continued, without acknowledging he heard her remark. “I know all of you will agree we’ve done a magnificent job over the years. But times have changed and it’s about time we consider how we can spend the foundation’s money more cost effectively. We’ve given it a lot of thought.”

“Who’s we?” Haddy croaked.

“The executive committee has given it a lot of thought,” Mash said. “Times have changed,” he continued. “At the time the foundation was set up, crazy people were the challenge. Modern medicine has met that challenge. New drugs have diminshed the scourge of lunacy. But now the mental health of our people is threatened by other forces.”

‘Like not having jobs,’ Haddy thought. “Like not having money so you can get the drugs,” she said, not looking at the lawyer.

“Like pornography,” the lawyer continued. “Pornography is the scourge that assails us from all sides today.” The old doddering nodding heads began to stir.

“We’ve thought about it a lot. Dr. Peter has shown us the figures on the spread, even here in Monrow, of dirty movies.” The heads around Haddy Washington stiffened and straightened a bit. “In my judgment the funds of the foundation would be better spent fighting this enemy of the people’s mental health and well being. After a lot of consideration I am recommending to the board that the hospital be closed and sold and the foundation’s current income be used to fund a new mental health project, the Vermeers anti-pornography project.”

“Ah ha,” Haddy thought to herself, “the cats out of the bag.” She sensed a ripple of disquiet.

“Of course the board will remain,” the lawyer continued. The heads which had become erect began to quiver. “We haven’t exactly decided what direction we should take so the first order of business will be to study the situation. The board will have a lot to do. At first it will just looking at this filth and trying to figure out what we think might be done. We’ll call experts, of course, but the ball will be in our hands. I have some examples here of the kind of stuff we might be forced to spend some time looking at. I’ve prepared some folders for your examination.” He passed a set of files around each of which had the name of a member of the board—except Haddy Washington, of course.

Haddy looked over the shoulder of the man in the wheelchair next to her. She wasn’t embarrassed only disappointed. Morris was bigger. She liked his shape better too. She had taken what he had to give and more. All the women in the pictures were thin and scrawny even the few black wenches.

“He ain’t so much,” she said. No one heard her. The members of the board had their heads buried in pictures of men with women, men with men, men with dogs, dogs with women, children with men.

She snorted. “Doesn’t seem a good way to spend money to me, lookin at dirty pictures.” None of the board members paid any attention to her.

“What about films,” one of the slobbering mouths dribbled.

“Films would be a great place to start, Tom,” Martin Mash responded. “We should have a committee on films. You could head it. We could look at the movie filth and begin to think about how we would improve the situation. There’s so much to be done. Of course the very first order of business will be to augment the capital of the foundation by selling the assets of the hospital. I move the board approve the sale of the hospital building and land and explore the new purpose and goal of the foundation. “

Haddy watched the men around her. “Vote, Vote,” the trembling heads croaked.

“All those for the motion to close the hospital, sell the building and grounds and use the money to study pornography, raise their hands.” Around her hands shot up.

“Is there anyone against the motion?”

Haddy Washington told her arm to get up. It moved slowly. She urged it on. “Go on arm, up arm” she said. “Up, up.” She struggled to raise it above her shoulder. It moved agonizingly slowly.

She raised it like a flag in a fierce wind. She didn’t quite know what she was defending only that her arm had to be up in the air. When had it almost fully extended the pain shot down her chest but she held it there proudly.

“Well its unanimous, then,” the lawyer said staring at the arm in front of his face. “Vermeers will be closed.”

It didn’t matter, she knew that. Her arm had been up, she had raised it. The honkies had done it again. At that minute, somewhere in front of her muffled by a cloth pressed by trembling, exhilarated fingers, a beeper went off.

Chapter 14

In the end most of us are reduced to imitating ourselves

Gabriel Dorsey was called Chameleon by his friends and Chameleon by his enemies. They only said it differently. When he grew up, he insisted on being called Mr. Chameleon. For a long time when people asked him his first name he shrugged. He could never find a first name suitable for a Chameleon. Then he decided that Gabriel Dorsey was a fitting first name so after that he introduced himself as Gabriel-Dorsey Chameleon. But everyone still just called him Chameleon.

Although his mother loved him and his father loved him and his brothers and sisters loved him he never felt loved, not really, not for himself. He felt more comfortable with his friends none of whom cared for him a lot, especially his friend Billy, who liked to dress up. Billy liked to dress up in costumes and Gabriel Dorsey started to dress up in costumes to please him.

Every day they played cowboys and Indians in the alley that ran behind the adjoining houses they lived in. The game consisted mostly of looking around for pieces of costumes. Billy was relentless. If he needed a feather to be an Indian, he would find a feather even if it meant spending the afternoon laying in wait to catch a pigeon. Perfecting the costume was at least as important as the game itself.

“We’re both Indians,” he said, “for the time being hunting a `turkey.’ Cowboys will come later.” Then the pigeon would escape and Billy would hit him. “I’m the chief and you’re a sucking failure as a hunter,” he would say.

Playing with Billy was painful and exhausting. Gabriel Dorsey didn’t mind dressing up but he realized very early that it wasn’t that much fun. In fact, it was hard work. He noticed there was a big difference between himself and Billy. Billy needed a costume to be someone or something. Requiring a costume to be someone else was a demonstration that Billy was a bumbling boob. Gabriel Dorsey could make his body into a costume. He could become who he wanted without dressing up.

Becoming someone else wasn’t as much effort for him as trying to find a costume to dress up in, but it wasn’t exactly easy either. He practiced all the time. He had to scrunch his body up or stretch it out with different parts going in different directions. He had to feel how tense or how loose every muscle in his body was and how he should tighten or loosen it. Even the scalp on his head had to be wrinkled like a washboard sometimes and he had to do strange things with his face and fingers. The worst was when he had to make a grinding, horrendous effort to shift his teeth. Then, when you got the person down right, you had to start on the way they changed when they moved or sang, or scratched themselves.

When he met a person he looked really hard at them, how they held their arms, how their hands angled from their body, what kind of motion their feet made when they took a step. Later he got to where he could break up a movement into the littlest parts. It was much better than dressing up in a costume, much more real.

He tried to explain the possibilities of the new game to Billy who hit him and told him that without a costume the game wasn’t fun. He kept on dressing up but practiced changing himself to be whatever the game demanded by making his body into a costume. After a while Billy didn’t notice that he really hadn’t taken off his pants and dirtied his underwear and wasn’t wearing one of the collection of feathers they had gotten from the dead pigeons they captured.

When they were playing cowboys and Indians one day, stalking another pigeon because they had used up the feathers of the dead bird they had found weeks before, he suddenly tired of the game. It was silly, it was childish. They had played the game every day since they were five and it was boring. He got up and hit Billy. “You’re a sucking failure as an Indian,” and went home. After that, he never played cowboys and Indians with Billy again.

When he was seven, he discovered a new game.

When a kid he was playing with wasn’t looking at him, he would become someone else. He even played the game with adults sometimes. When he changed into someone else people got confused and then they got angry at him and it didn’t help when he reappeared as himself. They would be even more confused and angry. If he was playing the game with someone his age, they hit him and told him they never wanted to play with any of who he was again. If it was an adult, they usually said they didn’t know what was going on but he should stop it, other wise they would hit him. The only reason they didn’t hit him was that they weren’t exactly sure who deserved the beating.

In high school he discovered a new way of being other people. When he was talked to someone, he was himself part of the time and another person very quickly for a little of the time. The person he was talking to saw him mostly but, out of focus, there was a different person who merged with him. It was even more fun.

When he graduated, he became a postman. It was a job he had picked carefully so that he would be exposed to a large number of people in a situation where he could practice, really practice, at becoming other people. No one ever paid any attention to a postman.

He practiced becoming all sorts of outrageous characters. He delivered mail one day as Mao Tse Tung another as Douglas Fairbanks Jr. He dropped off magazines as the mayor and junk mail as the president. Gabriel Dorsey couldn’t think of a better way to have fun all day, every day.

Until he fell in love with a woman who moved into one of the apartment buildings he delivered mail to, being a postman was a joy. He courted her like a cock courts a hen. He brought her other people’s certified mail, their brochures, their contest newsletters. Before he knocked on her door he would borrow the features of the handsomest, most virile, most sophisticated men he had met. He fine tuned his image until she could not resist him.

The day he enticed her to bed was his downfall. In the heat of his passion he began cycling through his repertoire of men looking for the particular combination of features that would set her on fire. The rapid passage through his inventory of males embarrassed and confused her and she lashed out. “Who are you? I’m in bed with someone and I don’t even know who they are.” She threw him out and her mail piled up in her box until the branch of the post office Gabriel Dorsey worked for received a change of address notice. She had moved to Cincinnati.

He comforted himself for a while by becoming her occasionally and stroking himself, but it did not help. The incident set him thinking. He tried to figure out where he went wrong. He thought at first that it was just that he had an off night and was not convincing. Then he became frightened that falling in love, that focusing on one person so exclusively, that becoming the man he thought she wanted, had diminished his skill.

He determined to practice again as he had when he was a child. He thought and thought of who would be the most difficult person he knew to imitate. After thinking about a really long time he decided it was himself.

He set about imitating himself, trying to take his own form his own gestures, his own motions. He practiced and practiced but he could never get it right. He got fired from the post office because the mail he was supposed to deliver piled up in his apartment because he stopped off to practice a gesture he had caught himself making as he delivered the first envelope of the day and spent the rest of the day practicing and practicing.

The loss of his job did not bother him. What bothered him was that he could not get himself right. The problem was that he had never pretended or practiced being himself. He had only been himself, and he was better at imitating than being.

He concentrated entirely on getting himself completely precisely correct, paying attention to the way lifted the soles of his feet when he walked, the way he articulated words him was especially fond of, the gestures he made when he was annoyed but not angry. The more he tried to imitate himself the more he found there was too little of him to imitate. He struggled and struggled to reach himself and woke up one day in Vermeers, imitating a chair.

At first it was a disappointment. There was only a small pool of people to practice imitating. Later, when he recognized that each person at Vermeers was always many people at the same time or only a rapid succession of parts of a person or never the same person two days in a row, it became a real challenge, especially when a new person came to the hospital, like the man in a doctor’s costume who was crossing the ward in front of him, and presented him with an entire new set of pieces to work with and a new puzzle to complete.

~~

The staff, whatever there was of it, had come in while Strayte was out taking Mr. Cricket for his walk. They were sitting around a table playing cards. Each of them had a name tag identifying the services they performed. The recreational therapist was a large, bouncy woman with darting motions that belied her weight. The art therapist was a thin, tired looking man with big feet and a torn sweater. The two aides were twins differentiated only by the fact that one wore large horn rimmed glasses. The social worker was a tall, well built man with an earring.

During the morning they worked together to keep the patients busy by letting them watch the five of them play cards. “It’s good therapy for them,” the social worker explained to Strayte after they had been introduced, during a coffee break in the game “They get to see how sane people behave. It’s not easy work but it’s socially useful.”

Lunch was uneventful As he walked into the cafeteria he saw the luncheon menu scrawled on the wall:

Donald Duck salad

Elsie hamburgers

Porky pig porkburgers

Chicken Little chickenburgers

Wally the whale fishburgers

Ghandi vegetable burgers

Sorel potatoes

Broken banana chips in water sauce for desert.

The social worker stood at the end of the counter depositing a fortune cookie on everyone’s plate as they went by. “Their Dr. Beeper’s idea,” he explained to Strayte. “The fortunes inside read ‘You are getting better.’ He feels that if the patients believe their fortune is to get better they will think they are getting better and get better. Every little bit helps,” he concluded.

Strayte counted the patients in the cafeteria. There were seventy-four, not including the two homeless men who had slipped in and were eating noisily in the back of the cafeteria.

He was in the middle of his second Porky Pig burger when the man who traded breakfast food came up to him. “I’ve really got an appetite,” Strayte said, hoping to put off negotiations for the half of the burger he was working on.

“No,” the man replied. “I don’t do lunch. That’s what got me in here in the first place. Working all of the time. Stress. No, I skip lunch, I mean trading. Anyway there’s no real profit in it,” he said, pointing to the two homeless men. “By lunch time, they can usually get in and fetch their own. Lax security,” he mumbled. “I see you liked the Porky burger, Don’t worry,” he said in a quiet, thoughtful voice, “it doesn’t really mean a thing. Bye the bye,” he said, “You wouldn’t be interested in a Mont Blanc pen?” he asked. “No nib, but the shell and cartridge are perfect. You can always get a nib from somewhere.”

Strayte shook his head.

“Well you never can tell. See you for dinner I hope. By the way my name is…” He stopped and took out a business card. Strayte looked at it. It was blank.

“Mittleman, Leonard. You could write it in if you had a pen, You don’t happen to have a pen on you, do you? No matter,” he said.

“I’ll remember it, Mr. Leonard,” Strayte said.

“No, just Leonard. Leonard is my first name. All my friends call me Mittleman. Call me Mittleman.”

“O.K. Mittleman,” Strayte said, as the man drifted off then turned and walked back.

“There was something I wanted to ask you,” he said, “confidentially as a doctor.” He moved closer. “Do I seem like a businessman to you?” It was a serious question.

Strayte thought a moment before he answered. “I’ve never seen you doing anything else but business. If that’s any indication of who and what you are, you’re a businessman, definitely.”

Leonard Mittleman hesitated. “I guess that’s right. It’s only that, recently, I’ve had my doubts. I’m remembering another life. Anyway, thank you,” he said and drifted off.

Strayte finished his lunch and drifted out, cracking open the fortune cookie as he ambled to the door. “You are about as sane as you will get,” his fortune said.

After lunch Nurse G drifted up to him, walking sideways so she could keep her eye on Mr. Chameleon, who waited until he was out of her field of vision to become a duplicate of her. “Make yourself useful,” she said. “Check on Frank Hymut. He usually has a fit right after lunch especially if he eats too much and doesn’t follow his diet. If he’s in the basement in the weight room it’s O.K. Come back right after you see him because I want to speak to you about maintaining order. It’s sort of an emergency. If Mr. Hymut is not in the weight room he usually makes an awful mess wherever he is.”

“Where’s the weight room?” Nick Strayte asked. Nurse G made a waving gesture with her hand. “Too complicated to explain. It’s in that direction. Ask the guard when you get to the end of the corridor.” Strayte set out for the weight room.

“Where’s the weight room?” he asked an elderly man stretched out on a chair wearing a badge that said ‘Chief of Security’. The man rose, and gestured to Strayte to follow him. He shuffled as if he were a sleepwalker. They went down a set of steps and wheeled into a maze of rooms and hallways. After a few turns they broke out into a long corridor. Halfway down the passageway the man pointed to a room to his right and continued walking down the corridor until he reached its end then reversed himself, walking past Strayte until he disappeared.

Strayte walked into the weight room expecting to see some sort of exercise equipment. Instead, he found a room with a hundred scales. There were bathroom scales, scales that were used to weigh freight, scales for weighing ounces of materials, microbalances and scales for weighing horses. There was even a scale that looked like it was used to weigh trucks. In the middle of the room a bulky fat man ran to each scale that would hold him and leapt on. Mr. Hymut was weighing himself.

“I’m looking for one that is correct,” the rotund man said. “The lowest I’ve gotten is 194.” He looked at least 250 pounds. “Ah ha,” he cried, “here it is, 174 exactly. They ought to keep these things in better repair don’t you think. Have you come to see if I had my fit?”

Strayte nodded.

“No, I’m O.K. Better than that, my diet’s working,” the fat man shouted continuing to leap on scales. “I may even have lost or pound or two. I’m O.K.. I had my lunch today, breakfast too. I’d tell you if I was going to have a fit. I make a fucking mess.”

Strayte walked out and tried to find his way back to the ward. There was a floor plan of the basement posted near a sign that said exit and pointed to a wall, but following its directions he got completely lost.

He traced his way back to the weight room again and restarted his path back to the ward. He made a left at the first juncture because he remembered distinctly that a right turn had gotten him lost him the first time. This time the corridor dead ended in the middle of a huge room where one of the participants in the argument he had watched in the morning before breakfast was standing on a ladder working on a mural sized canvas tacked to the wall. The black man who had spoken for him stood by the ladder holding up the Polaroid he had taken.

“It’s called ‘Crazy People Falling Apart,’” the black man said.

The man who had sculpted the bodies and faces of the patients in the morning before breakfast had roughly sketched in the group of figures from the Polaroid twice life size in the foreground of the canvas and was working on an imaginative detail of the background. The detail he was working on was a reproduction of the photograph of the group falling apart which he had worked in fractal style as part of the background behind the group of figures. He was copying the Polaroid precisely. Strayte could make out his own face distinctly.

“He’ll work on the big part later. Of course sometimes he never gets around to it. It’s the details,” the back who was holding up the picture said. “Details are important.” The artist had nearly finished his copy of the Polaroid. It was as if the picture had floated up and stuck on the wall. It was a perfect twin of the photo the black men held up.

“He’s good.”

“He’s the best,” the black man said. “A genius, a great man. Only don’t talk to him loud or he’ll cry and you will distract him.”

“Very nice,” Strayte whispered, “very, very nice.”

At the back of the room sat the other man who was at the center of the argument. By his side was a computer. He stared at the blank screen. There was no keyboard but Strayte could see a pair of earphones plugged into the back of the machine. Every once in the while something, Strayte could not make out what, appeared on the screen. It was never very clear. It seemed to be merely some reduction of randomness that provided the illusion of a badly tuned image.

“Do you want to listen?” he asked Strayte as he passed.

Strayte put the earphones on.

“Hear it. Very interesting,” the man said.

“Hear what?” Strayte asked. There was only a soft white noise coming through the earphones. The screen darkened. The man looked at him blankly and took the earphones back and put them on. Strayte saw the screen sprung back to an amorphous life, the dots rearranging themselves randomly.

“How do I get back to the ward?” he asked as quietly as he could. The black man shushed him. “Ask the librarian,” he said.

Strayte set off again walking right past the weight room again where Mr. Hymut was still leaping from scale to scale. “173,” he cried. “I knew it, I knew it.”

He found the library with no trouble because there were little penciled notes with an arrow pointing in the direction of the library wherever two corridors crossed one another

“It’s well stocked,” a neatly dressed woman who came up to him said. “I’m the librarian can I help you?” she asked?

“It really looks like a fine library,” Strayte responded, “I’m just browsing.”

“Take your time. Look around. It’s not quite the Library of Congress but it’s reasonable up to date. Some parts of the collection are better than others. We only have novels up to 1954 except historicals and romances and a few best sellers. The self help and the legal sections are complete as of yesterday,” she said sweetly.

“How’s your Sociology section?” Strayte asked.

“Not bad. Weber, Durkheim, Tarde, Hawley. The classics. No Marxists or Functionalists though. A little heavy on methods. Most of the journals and a lot of textbooks.”

Strayte looked at her.

“Oh yes, not everything but…The professionals donate. And when a publisher cleans out his stock we get a lot of it. The hospital is known for its tax write offs you know. Of course,” she said, “they’re books for crazy people. You can’t trust them,” she added ambiguously. She leaned toward him and whispered. “Many things in these books aren’t true. You have to watch them very very carefully. True things creep out of them and other, not true things creep into them and they upset people. I edit the ones that I catch.”

He looked around. There were two couples in the library. In a carrel, a woman sat across from a well dressed man wearing large badge saying ‘Vermeers’ Visitor.’ She was crying bitterly. Behind her was a window painted on the wall. The panes of painted glass held a beach scene. It made it seem that she had experienced some tragedy while on a vacation by the water. Strayte could hear the man repeating, “We are working on it. We are very close. You should be out soon.”

The other couple sat at a desk piled high with open law books. They were oblivious to the librarian or Strayte or the crying woman. They read a paragraph from one of the books then looked up into one another’s eyes.

“Garble vs Fort,” the woman said. “Here it is. I told you the word the judge used is functive not fungible. It makes all the difference in the world to the interpretation.”

“But he meant fungible,” the man replied.

“Nonsense, he meant functive.”

“No, if you look at his decision in Var vs the State of Georgia you see that he uses functive when he means fungible.”

“No, if had meant functive in that case he would have said fungible. That’s what he said in Beard vs Carson when he meant functive.”

The man squeezed her hand. “You’re right,” he said. “I was silly to argue with you. You had agency law perfect, always.”

She squeezed his hand back. “Not as much as you had torts.” They looked up from the lawbooks into one another’s eyes. “I love you.”

“And I love you too,” he said.”But why can’t you see that the legislature makes laws not the courts.”

She looked dreamily into his eyes. “No darling. You are a cracker barrel tort lawyer but you don’t know shit about the philosophy of the law. Not one iota,” and they went back reading the law.

“How do I back to the ward?” Strayte asked the librarian.

“There are no books in the ward,” the librarian said confused.

“I left the book I was reading there,” Strayte said, not wanting to make difficulties where there were really none.

“Straight out of the door go left then make two lefts in a row. You can’t miss it,” the librarian chirped helpfully. “Do come back again when you’ve finished the book you are reading.”

Strayte followed her directions exactly and ran into a room with a large red sign on it which read: Recreation Room: Recreational therapy in progress. Keep out.

There were about thirty patients gathered around a table watching the social worker, the art therapist and twin aides continuing their morning card game. The man who traded breakfast was playing and winning. Ignored by the staff, behind whom they were standing, because they were acting their normally crazy selves, the patients were signaling him wildly.

The recreational therapist and a small group of patients was gathered around the television set. They were watching Geraldo. In the corner a larger group of patients was putting on their own Geraldo show mirroring the show that was on television.

Mr. Chameleon was pretending to be Geraldo. He made a better Geraldo than the Geraldo on the T.V. screen, who, because he was in the middle of contract negotiations, was trying to out a new, softer persona that he hoped would land him a better contract. Mr. Chameleon had a glass in his hand that he was pretending to be a microphone. It looked more authentic than the microphone Geraldo was carrying which was the latest high-tech version cordless micro-microphone but looked like a small glass. And Mr. Chameleon had a glint in his eyes.

“We’re talking about peoples experiences with their pets,” Mr. Chameleon’s Geraldo yelled out. “Who wants to be first to talk about their experiences with pets.”

One of the women stood up. “I had a frog once. He was a virgin. It didn’t matter. I only kissed it and it got me pregnant. After that I didn’t keep frogs no more.”

Mr. Cricket rolled around on his chair. “Pets. God,” he sputtered, rolling around. “God had no imagination. Dogs. Cats. They’ve got four legs. Three, would make a much more interesting pet. They can’t speak. No imagination, that’s why.”

“Very interesting,” Mr. Chameleon’s Geraldo said. “Anyone else?”

“My husband abused our dog,” she said. “He was much too big. I said to him ‘why don’t you pick on me?’”

“You’re to close to the real thing,” he said.

“‘The dog is much too small for you,’ I told him. She was a Prince Harold terrier but she started to look like a daschund. “It was horrible,” she broke down and cried.

“Did you do anything about it?” Mr. Chameleon asked.

“I couldn’t stand it. I called all of the hot lines but no one could help. I called the police and a man came around who said he was a police officer but was dressed as a dogcatcher. He looked at the animal and said she was big and fat and looked well-taken care of and left.”

“What did you do?”

“I could see she was suffering. I…I couldn’t stand it.”

“And.”

“I put her out of her misery. I put her down.” She hesitated for a second. “Then I cooked her.”

Mr. Chameleon changed to Oprah “How was she.”

“She was tough, like an old whore.”

Another lady spoke up. “My dog worshiped the devil. She was a brown and white collie and talked in tongues.”

“What did you do?” he said.

“I called my priest and he brought over his great dane and we all performed an exhortation.”

“Did it work?” Mr. Chameleon questioned, having switched to Donnahue.

“Oh, yes. When she gave birth they weren’t bad seeds at all, only mutts. But they all talked in tongues and I had a hard time giving them away.”

“Well that’s all the time we have for today,” Mr. Chameleon declared sadly returning to Geraldo for the finale. “We’ll see you tomorrow when our topic will be,”—he leaned over and tried to hear what the real Geraldo on T.V. was announcing. “‘Crossdressers who like to cross dress.’” The television flickered out and went dark.

The ending of the Geraldo Rivera show signaled the end of the period devoted to recreation. Mr.Chameleon, the staff and the rest of the patients set out for the ward. Strayte reminded himself it was a madhouse and trailed them out.

Following behind Mr. Chameleon who was imitating someone familiar but strangely unidentifiable, Strayte knew that in three days he would not notice the craziness anymore, that it would all seem familiar and ordinary to him. It was the way people were built. Only a few genuinely mad people could hold onto their anger at the ordinary insanity of the world and he knew he was not one of them. He cocked his head watching Mr. Chameleon stop and cock his head at the parade of people walking beside him and realized suddenly who Mr. Chameleon had been imitating. It was Nick Strayte, it was himself.

Chapter 15

At the heart of every illusion is a misplaced conviction that reality is a good master

May Swenson left very little to the imagination; She was as out front and direct a person as you could find. She left no question in your mind what was on her mind. If she thought something she said it. She lived on the surface of herself so that she could eliminate all of the cracks and fissures and corroded places in her where bad thoughts could hide.

She could live on the smoothed out surface of herself for a long time but eventually she would overlook some fold and in the middle of some conversation with someone on the street or in a store, like some evil mushroom, her step father would erupt and move towards her and her mother would fall again and the surface where she lived would be ravaged by a hurricane and everything would be blown away and she would have to start again.

She realized that it was not enough to flatten herself out. She spent more and more time looking in the crevices of the world, taking things out of places that were covered and leaving them out in the open. She emptied bottles of their contents, smoothed out pieces of cloth, left every drawer jutting out, every door open, so her the image of her stepfather and her mother falling would have no place to hide.

Although she was a good worker, she got fired from her job because she emptied every folder in the office and left them lying around flat so she could see if anything was hiding in them and nothing could fall from them. Her husband left her because he could not move in their house any more. He wanted her to go to a doctor, to get therapy but she refused. She loved him and she recognized that she was behaving crazily but she was too embarrassed by the fits in which she screamed at her stepfather and tried to keep her mother from falling so she pretended indifference to his moving away.

After he left, she tried even harder to eliminate any places in herself where dark things could hide so that her stepfather would have no place to hide and he would not leap out and come at her when she was buying groceries or waiting on a line in the bank and her mother could not fall even a little bit.

In the end she reduced her living space to the floor of the closet in her apartment. She never went out but it did not help even though she stuffed clothing into cracks and taped the corners of the closet shut. Her fits disturbed the neighbors and eventually the police came and took her to Vermeers.

Vermeers helped. The lunacy of the other patients distracted her. She did not have a lot of space and she gave up trying to eliminate her stepfathers hiding places and when he came out and her mother fell again she screamed and screamed and no one thought she might be crazy because she was and it didn’t matter. And when she was not screaming she could live on the surface of herself and the surface of the other patients and help a little because most of the others were completely loony, and she could say what she wanted because she was insane.

~~

The closer the patients got to the ward the more they thickened into a turbulent mass. Checked by the darkened image of Geraldo at their rear, repelled by some anticipated frightful confrontation in front of them they found some chaotic center equidistant from two centers of pain and, at the moment Nick Strayte could see Nurse G ahead of them, stopped and refused to move at all.

Ahead of the stalled mob, the recreational staff fluttered on.

“Come on fellows,” Strayte said, “lets move it. Lets go,” he urged the patients forward. Mr. Chameleon turned and glared at him with his own face, the face he had turned on Dean Grundle at the faculty meeting, a face he had not shown at Vermeers yet. Although he could not figure out why he also felt anxious approaching the ward.

Over the heads of the patients who floundered and resisted as if an invisible barrier kept them from returning to the ward, Nick Strayte could see Nurse G standing. Next to her he could make out a very attractive tall woman with permed hair wearing a single long strand of pearls.

“Come on,” Nurse G called, urging them forward from the front as Strayte was urging them forward from the rear. “It’s time for group therapy, Miss Spanner is here.”

Nurse G. was not happy. She looked at the patients sympathetically and there was anxiety in her voice. “Therapy is necessary,” she said as if she was making a valiant effort to convince them of something she sincerely doubted. “Dr. Strayte,” she called, “help the patients.”

Strayte stopped as the patients stopped. His job was to urge them forward but he held back as they did. There was trouble ahead. He could feel it and now he knew what it was and what it looked like. He moved to the front of the crowd and walked toward the waiting pair of women.

Nurse G moved to his side. “It’s disorder season. trouble time,” she whispered. “Keep your eyes open. They get very agitated, they fight. Get ready. When trouble starts try to separate them. They only hurt other people accidently. They’re really only trying to hurt themselves.”

“It is time for group therapy,” Ms. Spanner said brightly. “We’ll only have time for one group today. You know your groups. Today lets do group F.”

A few of the patients moaned and yelped.

“Group F is sick today, Ms. Spanner,” a voice said. “Try D.”

“D is sicker,” another voice mumbled.

“We are all sick today,” a third moaned.

“I know,” Ms. Spanner said, “this is a lunatic asylum, that’s why you’re here. No. We’ll have group today. You know how we do it,” she said. Noticing Nick Strayte, she invited him to join group therapy. “I can see there’s someone new here today. Why don’t we invite him to participate in group.”

“He’s staff,” Leonard Mittleman said protectively, as if being on the staff might finally be something useful, shielding Strayte from something he needed shielding from. “I was thinking of becoming a member of the staff too, if I get better.”

“That’s wonderful Mr. Mittleman, I think members of the staff have something to gain from group too.”

The members of F group moved slowly and painfully to a place in front of Ms. Spanner. Strayte reluctantly joined them.

As he stood there he remembered a discussion he had had with an ex-priest, Bill Taylor, at the college, They were drunk. It was confessional time. The ex-priest had gone first. Now it was his turn.

“Let me see if I have you right,” the ex-priest said.”Sociologists try to objectively understand people.” He stared at Strayte repeating what the sociologist had just said. “You can’t believe that. You can’t be objective,” the priest protested,

“Of course not. It’s impossible to achieve. But it’s a goal to strive for, an ideal.”

“Why?”

“To be able to understand people.”

“So that you can ultimately relieve their pain, make their lives better.”

“No.”

“To make life easier for them.”

“No. Just to understand them.”

“And personally? What does it amount to?”

“To see how much you can take.”

He thought about it. “You forgo the pleasure you get when you help people.”

“Yes,” Nick Strayte said, “but giving up the goal of making people’s lives better makes it a lot harder to convince yourself that you are doing good when the only thing you are really doing is causing a lot of senseless pain. You gain and you lose. A lot of people think wanting to help is enough. It’s never enough. And a lot of times it masks a real desire to hurt people.”

“What about the natural urge to help. You have it Nick, don’t deny it.”

“I wouldn’t deny it. I just try to keep it under control. You have to be a priest or a psychotherapist to be able to convince yourself that you can help people.”

“Do you sociologists take vows, Nick? It would help. You should have to take vows. It’s a fine line you walk, a hair’s breath away from the abyss. If you don’t walk carefully, you fall into the hole and make chaos, outside and inside.”

“I know, I know.”

“No comfort.”

“No,” Strayte said, “no comfort at all.”

He had the feeling that although the ex-priest was never able to help himself he was reaching out from somewhere, twitching his memory, trying to help him. He listened as Ms. Spanner said: “Why don’t we all get seats and make our circle.”

Jesus, Nick Strayte thought. In public. She’s going to conduct group therapy in public.

“Wait a minute,” he said to her, “Don’t you think this would be better in a room somewhere? Everyone can hear everything”

“We don’t have things to hide from one another, Dr. Strayte, do we? In a lunatic asylum everything can be shared. What’s privacy here?” she asked.

The clump of patients broke up to fetch chairs and returned and made an irregular little circle with Ms. Spanner in the center. Leonard Mittleman brought a chair for Strayte. “You need to sit through this,” he said, “you can’t make it standing up.”

“Have we all been taking our medicine?” Ms. Spanner asked.

The patients nodded.

“Who’s in pain today?”

No one raised their hand.

“Isn’t there anyone who’s in a little pain today?” There was still no response. “Who’d like to talk about anything that’s on their mind.”

Finally a man spoke up. “My AIDS is bothering me. I think I’m dying.”

“Mr. Smith.” Ms. Spanner said. “Why are you pretending to have AIDS? You know you’ve been tested. You don’t have AIDS. Why are you pretending to have such a vile disease?”

The voice of Mr. Cricket squeaked from some fold in the mound of flesh. “First fucking spark of creativity God showed since cockroaches,” it said. “Fucking designer virus.”

Ms. Spanner looked at Mr. Cricket critically.

“They’re not perfect those tests,” Mr. Smith said. “I have AIDS,” he asserted, “definitely.”

The patient nearest him moved his chair.

“See, he doesn’t want to be near me.”

“He probably doesn’t want to be near you because you are insisting you have AIDS, not because you have AIDS. That’s crazy behavior.”

“He thinks I do, don’t you.” He turned to the patient who had moved away.

“It’s just that…”

“You don’t have to defend yourself,” Ms. Spanner said to the patient who had moved his chair. “How do you feel?”

“AIDS scares me,” the patient said.

“AIDS is a scary thing,” Mr. Smith said. “I feel it in my body changing things. It makes me think crazy thoughts. It’s not just dying.”

“Mr. Smith, does having AIDS make you feel more important?”

“No I want to crawl in a corner and shrivel up like I am going to shrivel up. I’m having trouble breathing. It’s horrible. Why should I have it and not him or him or her.” He pointed around the room.

“I don’t know,” Ms. Spanner said indifferently as if the question wasn’t an important one.

“Maybe he thinks he did something really bad that God is punishing him for,” another patient said.

“How did you get it?” May asked, “Did you stick your cock up some young stallion’s ass? Maybe that’s why God is punishing you.”

“If God didn’t want anyone to stick his cock up anyone else’s ass,” Mr. Cricket said, “he should have made the asshole a different shape than the other holes. It would have been easy. He just didn’t give a shit,” he said mischievously.

“Thank you, Mr. Cricket,” Ms. Spanner said.

“Who would have thought that doing it could have killed you.”

“Sticking your cock up someone?” May asked.

“No, going into a hospital for a small operation to have a bone straightened. Getting a transfusion. All the people with AIDS are dying. There will be no one alive to complain about the injustice.”

The patient next to him moved his chair back and put his arm around Mr. Smith’s shoulder. “He doesn’t have AIDS,” the patient comforting him said to the rest of the group. “His kid got AIDS and died.”

“He was only six,” Mr. Smith screeched. He threw himself on the floor. The patients stared at him.

“He was six, for Christ’s sake,” Mr. Smith wailed and started beating on the floor. “He withered and shrunk and died. He was in pain and I couldn’t do anything, nothing.”

“It’s very sad,” Ms. Spanner said “but you must get up and stop acting crazy,” Mr. Smith.

The man on the floor thrashed more wildly.

Strayte got up to go over to the man. “Sit down Dr. Strayte, Nurse G will help Mr. Smith.” Nurse G hurried to the flailing figure and helped him up and out of the circle.

“Who gives a shit,” May said.

“Don’t you think that’s a little harsh, May?” Ms. Spanner wanted to know.

“If you can’t take what comes you shouldn’t be alive. Your should commit suicide.”

“That’s unfair. May. I mean how could poor Mr. Smith expect his son to get AIDS when he went into the hospital to have a small operation to straighten a bone.”

“He probably got it from sticking his cock up someone’s ass,” someone else said nervously.

“No matter,” Ms. Spanner said.

“He should have expected the worst when he went into the hospital. Who expected…stuck…”

“Yes, May, who expected what?”

“I’m done,” May said and started humming.

“I’m sure you have more to say, May,” Ms. Spanner said. “When who stuck what…?”

“I’m done,” May repeated and swung around in her chair so her back was in the group.

“When who did what May,” Ms. Spanner asked.

May drew the silence around her and compressed it.

Ms. Spanner persisted. “When who did what?”

“Stepfather,” May exploded. “Stepfather, stepfather, stepfather,” she screamed. “Seven.” She was sniffling. “Fucking seven. I didn’t get AIDS. I wish I did.”

“That was an awful thing he did.”

“I didn’t think so at the time,” May said. “I don’t know. I was confused. I was glad he was paying attention to me.”

“Then you found out it was wrong.”

“No, I found out it didn’t make him love me more. I was hurt,” she said. “Angry.” She kicked at the chair next to her. Mr. cricket rolled around.

“It was a horrible thing he did,” Ms. Spanner said.

“Yeah, I guess so. Adults do horrible things to children. But then they do horrible things to other adults too, so what can you expect. He would give me candy afterward. I looked forward to the candy. It was the only time he ever gave me candy.”

“Thank you May for sharing that with us,” Ms. Spanner said.

“I hated my mother when she did it with him. I would hear them doing what I did with him. I hated her. but I didn’t mean…”

“Didn’t mean what,” Ms. Spanner said, smelling a larger pain under the fester?

“Nothing,” May said trying to control the memory.

“What,” Ms. Spanner persisted, keeping her finger in the wound.

“Nothing, I just didn’t mean it.”

“You’re talking crazily and not making sense,” Ms. Spanner commented, jiggling her finger a bit. “Don’t you want to get better? What didn’t you mean? It would make help if you talked about it.”

May surrendered “Fall down the steps. I didn’t mean to have her fall down and hurt herself. I didn’t mean it. It was an accident. And then he did it to me all the time and she…” Whatever May added was drowned in sobs.

“I think you must have suffered a lot,” Ms. Spanner said matter of factly.

“She was in the wheelchair. He didn’t care if she saw. She…” Suddenly May fled into silence and her back went rigid.

Ms. Spanner waited a moment. “We all know how you must have felt,” she said, refreshed from the climax.

Mr. Spanner saw Strayte glaring at her. “Is there anyone else in the group who would like to say anything?” she asked.

One of the two Japanese men in the group spoke up. “I don’t know who I am,” he said. “I knew once but I forgot. I forgot when I lost of piece of me and you ate it.” He glared at the other Japanese. “That was the most important part of me.”

“I did not eat it.”

“You did. There’s a part of me in you and I want it back. You don’t need it.”

“Give me back the part of me you have.”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t need it anyway. You have the piece from Hakausi.”

“And you have Nakamur’s.”

“He didn’t need it.”

Ms. Spanner interrupted them. “Neither of you…”

“They can’t know.”

“Can’t see.”

“I can’t see myself. Give me back my part.”

“Your frog couldn’t jump.”

“At least my frog could croak.”

“You are talking crazy again, Mr. Hirosi. And you, Mr. Tsai you just encourage him,” Ms. Spanner said.

Mr. Tsai smiled at Mr. Hirosi and spoke to the group. “He is really Korean anyway. Not Japanese. Not real Japanese.”

“That is a lie. I am as Japanese as you.”

“My grandfather was a samurai.”

“A shit Samurai,” Mr. Tsai said.

Hirosi swore in Japanese “Your part. I don’t have it anymore. I gave it away. I sold it. It was sent here, to America, in a shipment of ball point pens or floppy disks. Crap with crap.”

“You are lying. I can see it in you. I am ashamed to have that piece of me in your worthless body.”

“Stop it,” Ms. Spanner demand angrily. “Whatever it is that you are talking about it doesn’t make sense.”

Mr.Hirosi smiled at Mr. Tsai. “We are crazy Japanese. Sorry.” They bowed to her then to one another.

“Maybe we should give our new group member a chance to speak,” Ms. Spanner said, happy to flee from oriental insanity. “This is Doctor Strayte,” she added. “Doctor Strayte and I are acquainted. I know Doctor Strayte although he doesn’t recognize me.”

Strayte strained to place the face. The image of Dean Grundle flashed into his mind but the connection between the dean and Ms. Spanner was missing.

“Dr. Strayte is a doctor.”

“Yes.”

“What kind of a doctor are you? Dr. Strayte, a medical doctor?”

“No.”

The patients moved back in their seats. “I study people.”

“Not a psychiatrist?”

“No, a sociologist.”

“It must be a specialty I’ve never heard of,” May said.

Nick Strayte noticed Nurse G turn away from Mr. Smith for an instant and stare at him with a horrified look on her face. He noticed all of the patients who were not in group watching as if the therapy session were a soap opera on television.

“Don’t you have anything to share with us today Nick? Some pain. Maybe there’s something you are angry at. If you talk about it you can lighten your load. You can soar. Group can help you be the person you really are, it can let you fly. You do want to fly don’t you?” she asked smiling.

“No,” Strayte said sourly. “Flying was a disappointment.”

“Walk out of here then. Wouldn’t you like to be able to walk out of here, leave Vermeers whenever you want.”

“I can walk,” Strayte said.

“I mean walk free, whole, free of what’s bothering you.”

Strayte thought about it. He wanted to be free of the memory of it. He realized it was crazy. It was not therapy. It was the wrong time, the wrong milieu but he could not hold himself back. He blocked out Vermeers. “I’ve been accused,” he said ignoring the voice that shouted at him to shut his mouth. “Unjustly.”

“Of what Nick Strayte?”

“Of sexually harassing a student.”

“Did you?”

“No. We slept together.”

“Doesn’t that constitute harassment, of a student.”

“She instigated it.”

“But you were her instructor weren’t you Nick?”

“Not when…”

“Well before then, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think you exploited this girl? It was a girl, I assume?” Ms. Spanner said. “I mean you were so much older than she was and you were in a position of trust. What if she had been twelve or nine. Would…?”

Strayte face curled in disgust. “Of course not. She was an adult.”

“But think of the psychological power you had, your status, the respect she must have felt for you, her inability to keep from seeing you as a powerful figure. You used that to take advantage of her, didn’t you.”

“No, I didn’t,” Strayte said. “She saw me better than I saw myself. She took advantage of all of the powerlessness she had as a woman, to seduce me, only she wasn’t an innocent and she wasn’t powerless. She didn’t give a shit about me or her, she only wanted something I had. If I’m guilty of anything it’s maybe…laziness.” He looked at Ms. Spanner who was staring at him as if she could see what was going through his mind.

It was not quite true.

The night with Marsha was a sour night of sex. She had shrugged off his problem. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve seen a lot…She leaned over him and slid down. “Don’t…let me…” He pulled her up. “No. Not now.” She teased him. “I won’t tell anyone, not even Tom, if that’s what you’re worried about.” He new boyfriend Tom was the least of his worries.

What he worried about was how he had gotten himself into this mess. He had managed to keep his mind and hands off her ever since she started coming to his office, first with a revelation of what she did to make tuition and then afterward when they talked to carry her over pain. She was bright but all of her intelligence had gone into helping her survive an abusive father and live half on the street, half in the houses of men she met. He had not only kept himself from touching her. He had neutered himself. He had kept his own pain to himself. Now he had let her maneuver him to bed. He knew she wasn’t interested in the sex. It was not something she needed or wanted. If he had wanted her she would have given him what he wanted without thinking about it. It would have paid off her debt all in one stroke, and she would have increased a hold on him, but he had not shown any sexual interest in her at all.

She wanted something. They both knew it. For her, it was an economic transaction. One thing for another. He was still struggling with himself and it showed. She was doing what she did to live, bartering what she had to barter for something she needed. “Come on,” she chided him. “Let me go down on you. I’m good. Real good. You worried about what I’ll think. You’re a college professor. Smart, real smart. What do you have to worry if I think you’re a lion or a wuss.”

He pushed her off, rejecting her tender concern. “I’m not going to give you the exam,” if that’s what you have in mind.” She shrugged and slid her hand between his legs. “This is what I want from you now. The exam, well we can…”

He had taken the line of least resistance, denying she was ugly, denying he was impotent. It had gotten him here. That was part of it. But there was a hunger to it also. He did not seek her body out. But when it presented himself to him he reached for it. Because he could have it, he wanted it. She was using him the way he had used some of the women in his life. He felt his anger rising. He pushed her down roughly. He wanted to punish her, to inflict some pain. If she wanted to play games he would play.

He came at her in a fury, the anger toughening him. Some part of his mind worried he might hurt her but he held her down while He fumbled with himself seeking a position over her, closing his eyes and concentrating. When he opened them, the small, sneaky, smudge of a satisfied smile enraged him but his anger had been spent. He heaved himself off of her.

“Tom said your exams were harder than when I took your class. Won’t you give me the exam.”

“No,” he reiterated as she dressed.

“Well, you may be smart but he could teach you a lot about taking tests,” she said and slammed the door.

“Does that make it right, Nick Strayte?” Ms. Spanner asked, bringing him back to group therapy in the lunatic asylum.

“Of course not. No one was hurt. Maybe my pride, her sense of power. But it’s only a little human drama with real people with all their normal craziness made into a spectacle, made into ring in which other issues can be fought. It’s torn out of context, out of our reach, out of a circle of…”

“I’m sure the fancy words help you to live with yourself but you screwed this student and now you’re going to pay for it. That’s about the long and short of it, isn’t it.”

“I guess it is,” Nick Strayte said.

Ms. Spanner looked at him. “Don’t you think the world would be better off if male college teachers were replaced by women and people of color without macho hangups like taking their clothes off to make a stupid point?”

“There’s a dark side to sensitivity,” Strayte said. “Good intentions have the weight of a hummingbird’s fart and innocence gets crushed under the first real decision that…”

A fly flew into Strayte’s mind and landed on the connection between Ms. Spanner and Dean Grundle. At the time of the faculty meeting during which Strayte had taken off his clothes, she was the psychologist at the college. She had stood by the dean’s side at the faculty meeting pumping his anger up and down.

“God,” Mr. Tull screamed, “the unimaginative son of a bitch didn’t give us enough sense to see what we are.”

Strayte tried to lash out. There had been rumors about her on campus. “How about you, Ms. Spanner. How clean are you? Haven’t you done something you shouldn’t have with someone you…?”

“Of course, yes,” the therapist said brightly, “and his wife killed herself but that was her choice. That was her problem.” Ms. Spanner said it with so much clarity, conviction and moral certainly that Strayte felt like he had been dunked in a bath of ice water. “She killed herself and their child. The man with whom I was having an affair couldn’t take it. He went crazy.” She looked directly into Strayte’s eyes.

“How much of the chaos of the world are we responsible for,” Strayte asked suddenly.

“All of it,” Spanner whispered, “all of it. Well, it looks like the hour is up,” she said brightly. “I’m sure next week all of us will have more to talk about. I thought it was a very productive session.”

May stood up and turned from the wall and moved to the therapist quickly and hit her, not hard, but straight to the head. Ms. Spanner fell to floor, her string of pearls scattering. The patients ran around trying to break out of the circle of chairs that confined them, trampling her and sliding on the pearls. Strayte pushed the patients aside and helped her up.

“Are you O.K.?”

“Of course. She’s not that strong.”

“Aren’t you angry?” he asked.

“No. I don’t think she really wanted to hurt me. They are lunatics. It hurts but it feels good too. It means I’m having an effect, that’s what’s important.” As the patients milled around aimlessly, she limped out.

As soon as she was out of sight the patients lashed out. Someone tore at a pillow, chomping into the fabric until it tore. As the covering tore the feathers squirted into the air and danced over the patients heads. The patients butted into one another. May ran around trying to collect the feathers, “They’re mine,” she screamed “ they’re mine, hide them, quick.”

“What died?” a patient asked.

“I’ve broken, I’m smashed, I’m bleeding, my blood is floating around,” one of the quieter patients screamed.

The disorder moved from the people who had been in group outward enveloping nearly everyone on the ward. Nurse G tried to restrain one of the thrashing patients who hit Mr. Chameleon who out of fright took on the appearance of a wrestler and terrified every one around him. John John ran and huddled near the television set as May butted against the other patients flailing at her self wildly. Strayte hesitated then plowed into the melee pulling people apart. Then Dr. Heirath came running and pushed his way to the center of the crowd where Strayte was back to back with Nurse G pulling patients off the floor and walking them over to the periphery where, out of the center of the melee the social worker and the other staff members quieted them down.

After they got things straightened out and walked the patients back to their rooms, Heirath pulled Strayte over to the corner of the ward.

“Messy business,” Heirath said. “Thanks for the help.”

“Doing what I could,” Strayte said as cheerfully as he could. He watched Nurse G’s face dim. “That group therapy is a bitch.”

“You sure you feel all right?”

“I fell like someone used my head for a punching bag. A little headache, that’s all.”

“It’s a madhouse, isn’t it?”

“But no one was hurt.”

“No.”

“Well how mad a house can it be then?”

“I was planning on coming to the ward to discuss something with you,” Heirath said. “Lets go outside for a minute. There’s something I want to talk to you about.” As they headed for the doors, he stopped. “Maybe this isn’t the right time. Maybe tomorrow?”

“No,” Strayte insisted. “Now is as good a time as ever. I won’t ever be more ready than now for whatever you wanted to talk to me about.”

“O.K.,” the acting administrator said. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said as they walked through the doors onto the grounds.

“The good news first,” Strayte requested.

“Well, I was going to offer you a job if you were feeling up to it.”

“What job?”

“Well the government has strict requirements about who can be an orderly so that’s out. But anyone is allowed to run the place and supervise the orderlies so I was thinking of acting assistant administrator. Sociologists like to help people. Anyway no one is doing the job now. No one is doing anything now except me and Nurse G,” he added. “If you are going to get sacked at the university you probably could use a job.”

Strayte thought about it for a while. “And the bad news?”

“The job probably won’t last long. They’re going to close the hospital. I got a call this morning from someone on the board. She said they had a meeting yesterday and decided to sell off the buildings and start some new project. You want the job? I could really use the help.” He looked exhausted. “Even if they close the hospital it will be a mess. Getting the patients ready to go, handling the anxiety.”

“Why not,” Strayte said. He felt sorry for the liver man. “As long as they’re going to close the hospital why not. For a few days.”

“Well, that’s settled,” the acting administrator said. “Lets go back and see how the patients are doing. It’s too lovely out here. It’s distracting.”

When they got back to the ward things had quieted down. Strayte drifted around talking to patients. After a little while the acting administrator gestured for him to come over. “I’ve just told Nurse G that you are going to be acting assistant administrator for a while. I’m sure you two will work well together. I’m going back to my office. If there are any more problems send Hymut to get me.”

After Heirath left the ward, Nurse G put a ferocious look on her face and attacked him.

“You lied. It was a disorderly thing to do. Really disorderly.” She knew she had not lectured him when he first came onto the ward about keeping order before she asked him who he was, before he had a chance to lie to her. She might have had a chance if she had gotten to him early. It was still his fault, and the novels fault. But she had made a mistake. She had made a mistake and now she was going to pay for

“You said you were a doctor,” she said accusingly.

“I am a doctor. Strayte replied innocently.”

“But not that kind of a doctor.”

“A doctor. You never asked me what kind of a doctor. I would have told you. I hardly ever lie, it’s disorderly,” Strayte said.

Two mistakes, Nurse G noted in her head. “Well its still a mean trick, even if you are now technically my superior as assistant administrator. You won’t maintain any more order than Dr. Heirath. It doesn’t matter. I am not talking to you.”

Chapter 16

It is bizarre that people will believe anything as long as you can prove it to them

Emile Emile and Emily Emily were lawyers. They were an original odd couple.

They loved each other completely and totally because they were so perfectly opposites, so completely different. People always thought they were ordinarily queer, that he was a homosexual and she a lesbian and could not figure out how it was possible for them to have fallen so in love with one another and married. Most people thought their relationship was unnatural.

For them, loving one another was so plain and simple a thing that they could not understand how people could possibly not see how natural it was. They both loved the law and they loved each other because they had a lover in common. They were genuinely queer.

They loved one another indirectly but completely. Sex for them was a courtroom of first resort where the emotions that charged their relationship could be laid out. It was a period of discovery. They reserved their passion for the time after lovemaking when they would argue continuously about some detail of intercourse.

They loved the law but each in a different way, so different a way that the object of their affection came to be a completely different object. They never lacked a reason to turn to each other. They never lacked a subject to talk about. And they never lacked someone to clarify a point of law that was obscure to them. Other lawyers they knew had to consult massive compilations of the law, or journals. They had only to ask the other how they saw it, and the point was instantly clear. The point was always the mirror opposite of what the other said it was, but that was so minor a matter it was not even worth noticing. Each so clearly delimited the outlines of the object for the other, so surely identified its structure, so explicitly defined its dimensions, so certainly measured its mass, so conclusively set out its orientation that was no question of what the law was, what it meant, what its implications were.

Each was totally absorbed in the law. Each completely represented and embodied the law, just a different law. They were the same person but different beings.

Emily saw the law as a tool, an instrument for pleasure or pain, as a whore who could be made to do anything with the proper encouragement. The encouragement was always money. But money was only an excuse. The law was a real whore, the whoriest kind of whore, one who did it for pleasure but hid the enjoyment behind the opaque rationality of money. But the law was an innocent whore whose desire for pleasure was abused, who constantly reassembled herself again and set in search of a use to which she could be put that would not leave her bruised and torn, one that would recognize and satisfy the yearning to be well used.

Emile saw the law as whole and complete, indifferent to the uses to which it was put. He saw the law above men, recognizing that although men made it they did not make it as they as they wanted but as the law demanded it be made. Men were the instruments of the law, the vehicle for bringing it into existence, for manifesting its majesty. The fact that they had an ulterior motive, that they misused it, was as unimportant to him as the fact that painters produced masterpieces for the petty reason of having to eat.

They met in a courtroom and fell in love in a courtroom and courted in a courtroom. The judge threw the case out on a technicality. They lovingly re-raised the issue in an appellate brief in which they concurred on the error the judge had made. They sensually argued the case again and on further appeal again. They forced the plaintiff and the defendant to stay with the process when all they wanted finally was to be free of their entanglement with the legal process. They carried the last stages pro bono merely because they did not want to loose one another and were not yet secure enough to deal with one another outside of a courtroom. When Emile won and Emily lost, he immediately proposed to her and she accepted. In the back of her mind was the idea that they could retry the case in their kitchen, in their living room, in the bedroom if necessary until justice was done.

Each had been thrown out of the law firms which had hired them out of law school. They started their own firm. They had few clients but many lawsuits.

They made a fortune on a case that was without clients at all at first. They had started the lawsuit without standing and then found a client who gave them standing. They had read the law carefully and gone at large manufactures by inventing a class action client then filled in real people for the abstract plaintiff. They won and were on easy street. They were frequently consulted by other lawyers. If you wanted to start a difficult lawsuit you went to them. If you wanted to finish a difficult lawsuit you stayed as far away from them as possible. They enjoyed the law too much, they were in love with the law too much to want to see any case end. They won but always only at the very end, by a hair.

They had been committed to a fancy mental hospital by a friend of theirs who found them once in the elegant home they occupied, near death because they had not eaten in a week because they were arguing over the finer point of some tort. They had gone round the bend into a rocky canyon of the law and fallen into a ravine. They let themselves be put into the mental hospital because it relieved them of the onerous tasks of living and they could spend all of their time starting lawsuits. Even in the mental hospital it was easy. They ended up in Vermeers after being thrown out of three other lunatic asylums for starting lawsuits, occasionally against the hospital but often in the name of the hospital against someone else.

At Vermeers they had started a class action suit on behalf of the homeless which brought the hospital in a spotlight that threatened the nonlegal arrangements that made it possible for the hospital to continue. Dr. Heirath talked to them in a loud and clear voice. If they started another lawsuit without his permission he would take away their library privileges. They passed the lawsuit to someone else who dropped it immediately. For a long time they looked around for something that would satisfy the doctor but had found nothing. It had not diminished their love for one another. It had not even diminished their affection for the doctor. It had just sent them back to the lawbooks.

~~

Breakfast was exhausting. Almost all of the patients were agitated from group therapy and the chaos that followed it the day before. They formed an absolutely straight line and they took turns keeping each other in line. No one ate much breakfast. The businessman did no trading at all except to Strayte who was ravenous because of his new job and ate three plates of everything for which he had to sign another promissory note. He signed it looking at the counter where seconds and thirds of everything were piled up because none of the rest of the patients looked like they were hungry at all. “I could get them free,” he said, as he signed the note.

“You could,” the businessman said, “but it wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t be economic.”

“No,” Strayte said, “it would be free.”

“There’s going to be trouble,” the businessman muttered, looking at everyone’s half-eaten plates of food as Strayte signed the promissory note for considerations. “There was an extra ration of everything in everything today,” the businessman said. “But everyone only at an eighth of what they usually ate. Bad planning,” he said. “Well I’m going to try to rustle up some business. Bye Bye.”

Strayte finished the portions the businessman had brought. The idea that there might be trouble set him thinking.

His mind had been wiped clean for a little while. He had had a chance at a new beginning. If he could have held onto the middle ground, being insane in a sane way or sane in an insane way he might have accomplished something. But insanity frightened him and repelled him and he fled from it. He had watched himself go insane. The image of talking to Superman was engraved into his mind. He would never forget it. But he had neglected to watch how he had gone sane again. Now he was lost in sanity again and probably could never find his way out if he wanted to. His insanity started to seem like a mystery to him, fuzzy around the edges, clouded in the center.

But other people’s insanity, the insanity around him now that he was sane again was shining in his eyes and blinding him. The glare chipped at him. Not only here, where madness belonged, in an insane asylum, but outside, in the big normal ordinary unsophisticated modern world where sanity was synonymous with being healthy, mature and a prerequisite for getting into a health club or beauty parlor. Outside, in the world that was supposed to be sane, the style of sanity was changing, just as art and science and technology were changing, just as styles in fashion and games and toys and management techniques were changing.

People bought bottled water which was shipped over oceans and drank it while perfectly good water waited in taps. The college was negotiating for a computer system that was probably going to replace the first two years of course work as soon as the software was complete. His aunt was pestering her doctor to have a gene inserted in her to make insulin that would replace the insulin that a different bug made in a vat for her now. The Chinese, whose telephone system in the cities was close to two tin cans connected by a string, were exporting high tech telephones. Computer chips were being made in Honduras by people who practiced voodoo and had a statue of the Virgin and a dried chicken leg on their work stations next to the oscilloscope. A colleague in the biology department was working on a genetically engineered apple that stayed crisp for twelve years in your bathroom, as long as you did not put it near salt. The exact same item sold for fourteen different prices in fourteen different stores.

Sane people should have been angry. Even the lunatics should have been angry. Instead they were merely confused, taunted by personal histories and imbalanced transmitters, distorted by hormones gone awry. It was enough to make you crazy.

“Is there anything I can do?” Strayte asked Nurse G when he came into the ward after breakfast.

She stood stony faced.

“I know you said you weren’t going to talk to me anymore, but that was to Dr. Nick Strayte who was a recovered crazy patient who didn’t tell you he was a recovered crazy man and pretended to be a medical doctor. But as acting administrator that’s a different matter. It’s a matter of maintaining order, of keeping discipline.”

“Well as acting administrator I guess I would have to talk to you at least some of the time. You have a visitor,” she said and turned and walked away.

He walked over to where the female undercover cop stood whose life he had saved.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” Strayte answered, “really fine. Where’s your uniform?”

“Half a day off,” she answered. “because of the stakeout yesterday. I came for the coat,” she said. “The sergeant insisted. It’s against regulations to…”

“Of course,” Strayte said. “I think the doctor has it in his office.” He turned.

“And I wanted to thank you again properly. You saved my life.” He turned back.

“Me and Superman,” he joked.

“I wasn’t sure…”

“What shape I was in.”

“Yes. Well you were in bad shape yesterday.”

Strayte remembered and he blushed. “Well I’m as good as I was the day before yesterday. You made a great Hasid,” he said.

“Thanks.” They stood awkwardly for a minute. Strayte saw Nurse G heading in their direction but the figure in motion suddenly changed to Dr. Heirath picking his way between patients. It was Mr. Chameleon sneaking toward them.

“Whatever happened to the maniac who tried to kill you?” Strayte asked.

“They took him to CTTL.”

“You didn’t lock him up?” Strayte asked incredulously.

“His lawyer was over in a minute. He was some sort of minister. In the commotion the knife got lost and he said he was only trying to protect us from you. The mayor called and asked his cousin to see if we couldn’t keep it quiet. The D.A. heard all this and said that it might be hard to make the charge stick. It wasn’t a total loss. We talked it over at the station house. No one has better insurance than ministers. This one had great insurance. Anyway he went to CTTL. It seemed the best deal for everyone. Are you really doing O.K.?” Do you remember who you are?” she asked, not totally convinced that he could have recovered so quickly.

“Not only do I remember who I am but I remember that I’ve been offered a job. The doctor who is acting administrator and acting chief medical officer and acting chief psychiatrist thinks the job won’t last long because the board that runs this place is going to close it down. He’s wrong. It takes more bureaucracy to simplify things than let them stay complicated. Simplification on one level just complexifies things on another. Given the way things are, closing this place may take forever. But of course it is a madhouse and they may manage to do it with one swift turn of the crank. Either way, it will take me away from the weirdness at the college. I anticipate I’ll be getting crank calls at home or worse.”

“Because you went crazy?”

Strayte realized he hadn’t told her anything. “I’ll tell you in a little while,” he added, “about the crank calls.”

“What is it like here?” she asked.

“Actually, not bad. No one is trying to kill you. It’s a lunatic asylum. Everyone’s pretty crazy. But I’m starting not to notice. After a while you stop seeing the bizarreness around you. It’s the human Achilles heel. As long as something is real, you adapt, you adjust. There are drawbacks, of course,” he added. “A person’s mind can adapt to things that the person’s body can’t adjust to. We adapt to things we shouldn’t adapt to. Then nature adjusts and…” He made a slicing gesture with his hand.

She nodded. “Sounds like your lecture.”

He looked puzzled.

“The lecture I heard you give at the college. You were talking about order and disorder.”

He recalled vaguely that she had mentioned a lecture when he was huddling in his underwear, covered by the fur coat with the draft coming from the slits under the chest. “I remember yesterday you mentioned a lecture I gave. I can’t remember it. I don’t think it has anything to do with going crazy or the hospital. I don’t think I would have remembered that particular lecture the day after I gave it.” It was true although he couldn’t remember why not.

“Oh, you’d probably remember the ideas,” she said. “I went and looked at my notes. I keep very good notes.” She smiled. “The lecture impressed me. It even impressed Bill Taylor. He taught at the college too.”

Strayte nodded and struggled to remember the ideas about chaos and disorder that were the skeleton of the lectrue but gave up.

“How is your partner?” He rubbed the spot the nun had kicked him.

She whitened. “He’s O.K. There was something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“If it’s about the coat we could probably get it now.”

“Not about the coat.”

“About the lecture?”

“Connected to it, sort of.”

“Lets find somewhere to talk.” It felt good talking to a woman again like this, sentences thick with ideas, words like the touch of fingers on thighs. He felt he could take the liberty of that kind of intimacy; he had saved her life.

They headed for the double doors through which Strayte had pushed Mr. Cricket. It was gray outside, threatening rain. “We can talk here,” Strayte said pulling up a couple of chairs. He saw Mr. Chameleon follow them and pull a chair away from the wall and sit down.

She took off her coat and sat down. The gun she had in a shoulder holster shone dully.

“They make us wear it all the time. I can use it,” she said. “I’m a good shot but I hate to carry it around. It’s beautiful here,” she said. The rise in the middle of the lawn almost hid the other wings of Vermeers. It felt as if you were looking to a grassy horizon.

“What did you really want to talk to me about?” he asked softly.

“He raped me,” she blurted out. Tears squeezed out of her eyes. “I needed to tell someone, another man.”

The words rolled over him and he struggled for a distance. He wanted to ask her why she was telling him. He hardly knew her. Perhaps it was because he had kept her from being stabbed. If he was crazy it didn’t matter. If he were sane he was a professor. She needed to talk about it. “Who raped you?”

“The nun. My partner Billy. Last night. After we brought you in. He was high from the arrest, from the costume. We went out to eat…and afterward…”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. Last time he started dropping his pants I took out my gun. But this time…”

“Why didn’t you…?”

“It didn’t seem to matter. He’s is stronger than he looks. It just didn’t seem to matter. I’ve felt powerless before. Did you ever rape someone?” she asked Strayte

“No,” he said, “that’s a line I never crossed. What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, maybe….”

“Why don’t you report it? Turn him in. There must be rules, even in the police force, about partners raping partners.”

She stared at him. “I have to live with these men. The scandal would kill my father. Besides, I’ve never believed in depending on the law to do your dirty work for you.”

“You’re a cop,” he said a little bewildered.

“So’s Billy. Especially not cops.”

He knew she was going to tell him the details and he wanted to tell her to stop but he couldn’t.

“It didn’t matter. He was wearing parts of the costume he had worn on the stakeout. I fought back for a while. I un-holstered my weapon then I gave up and went away somewhere. Where I went wasn’t so nice. When I came back it was over. Billy was done. He asked me if I wanted to wear a piece of his costume, as a souvenir. I said no and he took me home. It was grotesque.”

She looked like a small child. Tears were squeezing out of her eyes.

“Afterwards, when I got home I was in a sick. But…I couldn’t focus as much on the outrage as…it bothered me but…The only think I could think about was Bill Taylor.” She told him about Bill Taylor. “We were lovers. For a year. He was an ex-priest.”

“I know he was an ex-priest,” Strayte said. “We had a few drinks together.”

“He went to California, got a professorship at Berkeley.”

“So I heard.”

“He ‘married’ another man, another ex-priest,” she said. “What Billy did was evil but…. He violated me but I knew who I was, what I was. It left a lot of me intact, inside of me. When I got the letter from Bill It pulled the past out from under me. It wrenched who I was out from under me. It made me unsure that what I saw was what was there was to see, uncertain that what I felt inside was real. It introduced chaos into my soul.” When she said soul it did not feel like she was exaggerating. “How can I compare myself with a man as a lover? How can I evaluate myself, know where I am with a man as a yardstick?”

Strayte felt he was losing his distance, coming close to the pit, the darkness. “Why compare yourself to a man. Sex doesn’t lend itself to comparisons,” he said quietly.

“It does. It certainly does,” she said.

Strayte wanted to tell her she had better get used to it. He wanted to reach out and put his arms around her and hold her tight and whisper that we were living in earthquake times and the ground that we stood on was going to become molten and swirl out from under us and the sky above us was going to be pounded and shattered and come floating down and bash us in the head and cover us with shit until we couldn’t see in front of us and didn’t know who we were anymore. The edges were dissolving; man, animal, plant, mineral, children, adult, working, playing, the dead, the living, all of the boundaries were disintegrating, all of the lines were being redrawn. It was chaos. But it was too cruel, too much like the lecture he had forgotten. The urge to gather her up in his arms to hold her tightly and cover her up was intense but he wasn’t sane enough for that and he didn’t know what to say.

He let the distance drain away. He wanted to feel whole and he wanted to make her feel whole, to give her some sense of her strength, brush away the fuzz and help her concentrate of what was essential. She wouldn’t need much support. She was strong. She was intelligent. But he knew it wasn’t enough but he couldn’t quite figure out what would be helpful.

“Well you didn’t see Superwoman did you, you didn’t try to fly?”

“No.”

“Well what more could you demand of yourself that you didn’t fling every shred of sense away and go completely crazy. I did,” he said. He looked at her. Mr. Chameleon had come closer and was staring at her over Strayte’s shoulder.

“It looks to me as if you’ve gone though the hard shit. If it were me, I’d report the bastard but…” He said to her what he had been trying to find the words to say to himself. They were trite but it was all he could come up with. “You have another piece of the puzzle. Use it.”

“What about you,” she asked. “Why did you go crazy. You looked crazy sitting there in the puddle claiming that Superman was teaching you to fly.”

He told her the story, the book yanked from the presses, the harassment charges, Dean Grundle the grant, the tenure. “The crank calls will start now. Dean Grundle in a disguised voice, and probably the president of the college disguising his voice and all of the other angry people in their own voices. If Marsha didn’t recant, if she pushed it, there would probably be a squad of television cameras outside his door maneuvering the electric company’s holes on the street, clamoring for his balls.”

“Did you?” she asked.

“Did I what?”

“Rape her.”

Strayte was tired of defending himself. “No. I didn’t even harass her. I slept with her. She raped me,” he grunted.

“A big strong man like you,” she said sarcastically.

“There’s more than one kind of rape,” he said. “I couldn’t hold on to myself, I couldn’t defend myself against myself. I don’t mean against the drive to fuck her. Against how she was playing with me.”

“An excuse.”

“Maybe. I should have known better. She was a student. But she was very smart in a modern way. I’m smart but in an old fashioned way. She knew how to play me. She left me powerless. I knew what she was doing but I couldn’t help myself. I was a lot older than she was. I thought I had a lot more experience too. But it was experience with a different world in which people played by different rules. I just wasn’t up to the modern game. Whatever power I had broke down. Power can break down,” he said. The tears started cursing down his face.

He stumbled somewhere, not into his personal craziness but somewhere else. She watched him go and called him back. She leaned against him, head pressed against his chest. He held his arms rigidly against his body then surrendered and put them gently around her.

They sat there in silence. He imagined her mind was full. He stomped on the desire to talk. But his mind was racing in a bruising, blustering, repetitive monologue that he couldn’t control.

There’s no longer any way to escape from disorder. Disorder had moved to the center of our lives. It occupied the center because the only order that could make any sense to us as individuals is the little world we lived in, the personal connections that tie us to the people we see and talk to and touch. But these worlds had been completely swallowed up.

We had become small parts of a monstrous large system that had become essential to get the smallest things we wanted and needed. But this large system was invisible to us. We could not see or feel or smell or grasp it with any of the ideas that get us through an ordinary day.

What made sense in this big world was lunacy in the small worlds; What was insane in these small worlds made good sense in the big world they made up. It was a recipe for chaos.

The more we tried to make these little worlds orderly the more disorder we injected into the large system they made up, the big world. And this disorder came back to us because the more the people running this big system tried to compensate and adjust for the disorder we had created by making the little systems orderly, the more disorder they injected into them.

It was the essence of the lecture he had given and forgotten and he suddenly remembered why he forgot it.

A Japanese company had sponsored a lecture series for an elite group of students at the college who were being groomed for elite positions in some elite government bureau where they would probably make decisions about Japanese imports. The company was looking to give a great deal of money to the program for a distinguished professor. He was on the block. He was the college’s best shot. His lecture was supposed develop the theme of modern American society as a world melting pot. They were very disappointed in what he had to say.

“Not quite what we had in mind,” the manager of the New York branch of the Japanese firm said to the director of the project who pulled back the hand she had awkwardly extended and looked angrily at Strayte.

Strayte came back to Vermeers slowly and looked at the woman sitting on the chair next to him. “I think I had better get home,” she said, lifting her head from his shoulder and wiping her eyes.

“And I better get back to my job as acting assistant administrator,” he said, brushing the arm of his white coat against his face. “If it’s not going to last long I am sure I will have work up the kazoo. He saw Mr. Chameleon rise as they rose and begin imitating her walk.

“The lecture,” he said. “I missed something. I ignored the way the craziness from the big world seeps into our personal lives. I missed the little disorder. I missed Superman and Billy.”

At the door they said goodby Strayte realized he didn’t know her name. “Helen O’Rourke,” she said before he asked.

“Visit me again,” Strayte said.

“I will,” she promised.

As she was heading for the door Strayte remembered something. “The coat,” he yelled.

“It doesn’t really matter,” she yelled. “I’ll pick it up next time,” she said and went out.

“They are still agitated,” Nurse G complained to him after his visitor had gone and he had returned to the nurses station both depressed and elated about the visit.

“A little group therapy goes a long way,” Strayte commented ironically.

“It’s not only that. They always get agitated Thursdays,” Nurse G explained

“Why Thursdays?”

“The minister comes,” she said without explaining. “The minister comes and they reenact some religious event, like the crucifixion or the day Buddha found out about death, or the burning of Joan of Arc or…. He’s very ecumenical.”

“Are they always depressing?”

“The minister says it’s enlightening and that death always has its up side because it leads right into rebirth and rebuilding.”

“Which days do they reenact the rebirths on?” Strayte wanted to know.

“Oh they only do deaths and painful events. ‘Getting better would be their rebirth,’” the minister says.

“Thursday. But today is Wednesday,” Strayte remembered. His memory was beginning to function normally.

Nurse G looked at him. “Of course it is. And tomorrow is Thursday and the minister isn’t even coming because he’s busy. I know that and now you do but they don’t know it do they. Anyway it probably doesn’t have anything to do with the minister. They heard that the hospital was going to be closed.”

“Speaking of closing the hospital,” she said, “Dr. Heirath asked me to tell you he wants to see you after you finished breakfast.”

“Where’s his office?”

“Which office?”

“Dr. Heirath’s office,” Strayte asked.

“He has three. Do you mean the office he has as acting administrator, or the office he has as acting medical director or the office he has as acting chief psychiatrist which he shares with the acting medical director?”

“Where is he?” Strayte asked in desperation.

“He’s right behind you, coming onto the ward.”

Chapter 17

Creative irrationality is art’s reason

Art was art. Henry Henry had come to that conclusion somewhere before his fourth birthday. He hadn’t said it in that many words only the idea was absolutely clear to him. The clarity never left him. Not even when he went completely around the bend and they hauled him away to Vermeers. It didn’t matter. There was art everywhere, even in Vermeers.

Art was art. It was as clearly itself and different from any other thing as was grass from birds or houses from the ocean. You could spot it anywhere. It just sat there like every other thing in the world. It didn’t jump in your face or scream at you. It just was there. And it was everywhere. That was what Henry Henry found so wonderful. It was everywhere.

Sometimes it was in the most unlikely places, in store windows, on trunks of automobiles, on lampposts, in backyards.

You could be walking down the street and they would be tearing down a building and the skeleton cringed there, grotesquely distorted, twisted out of shape waiting for the next blow of the steel ball. As a building it was a failure. As a work of art it was complete and ultimate, if very temporary.

Or you could be eating in a restaurant and the waiter would come and move things around and toss plates down and move away without even noticing he had created a masterpiece—and eating after that was a dicey deal.

Henry Henry even found art in museums, ‘but not as often as you might think,’ he would tell his friends. And in art galleries also, but even less than you would think.

He found the art he encountered was not graded. Any art was the equal of any other art he found. This disappointed him in a way. Like everyone else he had been taken in by art critics who made their living grading art. He had come to expect art would come in different qualities, good, better and best, but he found that was not the way things were. Instead art was art, one brand, one quality, one grade.

By the time he was fourteen he was in deep trouble. He was at the mercy of art everywhere. His parents began asking him what he wanted do when he grew up and he looked at them as if they were crazy. Why, he wanted to know, was there any need to work at anything when there was all of this art, free. They insisted.

The only thing he wanted to be was a work of art. The closest thing he could think of to do was to be an artist, although he wasn’t sure what that meant. His parents were quite wealthy. He had an older brother who was interested in carrying on his father’s plastics business so his parents had no particular ambitions for him. Nonetheless being an artist did not quite sound appropriate. His parents went along with it because all of their friends thought it would be exciting.

In high school he had started taking art courses and immediately got into trouble. There were some very respected pieces of ancient art which obviously were not art. No way no how he would scream at his teacher, Mrs. Broggle, who was showing slides to a completely uninterested class.

In his classmates Henry Henry encountered the first of the intimidations that would plague him. Because they used the darkened room to neck and pet, his constant interruptions of what otherwise would have been a pleasant forty minutes of uninterrupted adolescent passion annoyed them.

When he refused to keep quiet in class the students ganged up on him. A few of them beat him in the school yard after class. Others complained to Mrs. Broggle that he was interfering with their appreciation of art and he was expelled from the class and made to spend his time in the wood shop.

What puzzled him most through high school was that people could not see which were the art things and which were not. He felt it was like looking at a street and not being able to tell which things were houses and which things were trees and which things were flowers and which things were people. It took a long time before he realized that most people were art blind, that it was not obvious to them that some things were art and other things weren’t. Most people did not make, could not make, the discriminations he did. Art was not an objective feature of other people’s world the way it was a natural, unavoidable, obvious feature of his.

When he discovered this fact he was sick for weeks. At first, he felt very superior to other people. Then he realized that this gift made him into a freak, that he was marked, that rather than being a blessing, it was as diabolical a curse as God could have invented.

By the time he got to college he learned to use the language that most people used to speak about art. His mastery of the conventional language of art changed his strategy. In art classes when a professor presented something as a piece of art that was obviously not a piece of art, he would try to convince them that they were wrong, that they had made a simple, understandable and rectifiable mistake.

He would try to put into easily comprehensible words the difference he saw out there in the world. It was excruciatingly difficult work since art was art and things that weren’t art were not art and it didn’t take any words to discriminate between them. In fact words did a bad job of catching the differences which weren’t a linguistic kind of a thing.

He had the same problem outside of class. As soon as most people were told that what they were looking at was a work of art they stopped seeing what they were looking at—so as not to interfere with the effect the work of art was having on them.

Museums were a terror for him. Out in the world when he encountered art it was enmeshed in the life around it. Its power was muted by the dulled environment in which it was exposed. You could moderate how much of an impact it had on you. If he watched what he was doing he could bring it to him slowly and pull away if it got too strong. In museums though, the occasional work of art, isolated on a wall was completely unshielded and he would sometimes be overwhelmed by it, and fall on the floor and be carted off to the hospital or the first aid station depending on the museum, until finally he was refused admission to any museum in the city unless he signed a written agreement not to get within 10 feet of any real work of art, especially any that overwhelmed him.

He became an artist with reluctance. He recognized his ability to see art, was a hindrance to producing art. He easily mastered the techniques for producing paintings and prints and sculptures and his teachers felt he was going to go far as an artist. He could reproduce anything yet he could see that the reproductions no matter how great they were, lacked something. But although the difference between art and non art was immediately obvious to him he could not tell what exactly it was that distinguished them. He did not know how works of art came into being. He began his career by reproducing things that people thought were art but he saw immediately were not really art at all. This gave some latitude for creativity since by trial and error he would modify the painting or whatever he was doing to make them more art. He sometimes managed to make one of these works of art that weren’t works of art into a real work of art.

No one would buy these. They recognized the changes at once.

“But you left out…” they would say, or “what is that doing there? It isn’t in the original.”

His reproductions of masters brought him a very good income. But they were a distraction and he decided to stop making them.

After a while, he developed a technique of listening and watching. He would stare at a blank canvas for hours and pace and wait for a piece of art to be attracted to the blank canvas. It was excruciating work. He would sit for hours and then, in a distracted moment after he had dropped a tube of unopened paint and bent down to pick it up, a work of art would slither across the canvas and he would catch a glimpse of it upside down, whole and complete and he would do the equivalent of paint by numbers and make a masterpiece.

The critics dismissed him as a technically skilled imitator, an unoriginal smearer. They paid no attention to his original paintings at all. Eating, except when his parents sent him some money became problematic.

Then he fell in love. He fell in love with a woman, a girl really, whose name was Laura. She was a derelict of a teenager strung out on drugs, and homeless. She turned tricks and gave blow jobs—whatever she could to score. He met her at a party that was given to celebrate one of his miniature successes. She was his prize And went down on him in the middle of the drunken brawl that the party turned into.

She fell in love with him as well as she could. Somehow being near him reformed her although she couldn’t tell why. She stopped doing drugs, she stopped giving blow jobs. Even though they were not married, she settled into the role of an artist’s wife.

She took him to parties, mended his clothes, chased his friend out when they seemed to be interfering with his work. She was an ideal child bride. After a while she got bored at his sitting in front of blank canvases waiting for something to happen and then painting furiously for another day and then falling asleep.

He started painting her to keep her with him. He would always have a large blank canvas stretched and sitting on an easel and a smaller one next to it on which he was always working on a painting of her. When he was working on one of the larger canvases, painting a work of art, she would take one of his smaller paintings and try to sell it on the street for twenty dollars.

They began to eat regularly.

It was during one of these sessions when he was finishing a painting of her that he realized that she was a work of art. She was naked, hunched over, tired of sitting and he looked at her and realized that she was the work of art. He couldn’t quite tell why he had never seen it before but there she was. Compared to her, the painting of her he was doing was a shadow.

He was confused by this sudden emergence of art where there had been none before. After that he watched her all the time he could. She loved the attention but she couldn’t figure out what was going on and he couldn’t explain to her what was happening because he didn’t know himself. After a while he realized that she was a variable work of art. He had never seen anything like it but he understood that this was because of the limitations of the beliefs he had about the world.

All of the art he had seen in museums were permanent works of art. He had never noticed any difference between his different viewings of them. He had jumped to the conclusion that all works of art were permanent. Whenever he had seen a work of art on the street, he assumed it was of the same species, so to speak. He had never stayed around long enough to see if, after a while it changed back into something else.

After that, he used the painting as an excuse to get her to pose. He started to make sketches forcing her to change positions often. He became disgusted for a time with his limitations as an artist. Sometimes she changed so quickly from a work of art to a non work of art and back again to a different work of art he could not catch her artness.

He talked her into letting him take pictures although she thought it was kinky and was worried that he was thinking about making her go back to what she was doing before he met her. But he would take pictures and the photographs, if they were artless enough, were themselves images of works of art.

He began to worry about losing her. Poverty sapped his confidence in being able to hold on to her. He began to think that she might become attracted to a rich artist who would not make her change poses quite so often.

He went back to making money by reproducing works of the masters. On one of his binges of earning money he decided to reproduce all of the works of Vermeer. The project was so demanding that he stopped paying attention to her and she fell in love with someone else.

She came to him and told him. He realized that while she genuinely loved this other person she loved him more. Her affair was something between a holiday and test of some sort. He understood that what she really wanted was him back again looking at her.

Money had become a problem again. Instead of selling his paintings on the street she had begun to trade some of them for small amount of drugs for her new boyfriend. The world her lover lived in was familiar but now alien to her. It held no attraction for her but she provided him with money he needed so she could be near him. She had made a connection with a drug dealer, a small black man who became infatuated with the artists paintings. At first unenthusiastically, later with a wild thirst, the black man had bought the paintings. He pressed her for more paintings. He asked to meet the artist, but she put him off, keeping him dependent on her for the works of art to which he had become addicted.

Henry Henry had no problem with the affair and as the project was wending down he was confident that he could rewin her love. Then he met her lover at a party.

He had thought at some point that this might happen and since he was confident in her love for him and certain that he could get her back he had decided to be civilized and understanding.

Only, when he met her lover, a kid, an adolescent only slightly older than she was, it turned out that he was a work of art himself.

Together they were stupendous and he got sick at the sight of so much art together which was overwhelming and he couldn’t understand how everyone else in the room kept on drinking and talking.

Together they were awesome even though they weren’t nice to one another and fought viciously. When he took her home she flung herself into his arms and avowed she really loved only him; she swore that all that would make her happy was to return to being only his model and wife; she did everything but tell him to tell her that she should break up the affair.

He knew everything she said was true. And he knew he loved her so completely that he could not live without her. But he couldn’t ask her to break up the affair.

Together she and her child lover were so stupendous a work of art, so magnificent a creation that he was frightened of the consequences of separating them, of what it would do to the fragile world they shared. The responsibility was too much. Making art was one thing, destroying art was another. He could not.

She made a phone call and left him and he started painting. He started with her parts, her arms, her legs, her lips, her breasts. Then he started putting pieces together. Then he started on what he knew were her lovers parts, his head, his face, his legs. He put them together overpainting his fake Vermeer’s when he ran out of blank canvas. When he ran out of turpentine he used his own urine to dilute the oils. When the tubes of paint ran out he couldn’t stop and stated painting with his own shit. Later, the police came and took him to Vermeers.

~~

The morning the staff disappeared Nick Strayte expected the worst. The acting administrator and acting chief medical officer and acting chief psychiatrist was more sanguine as he handed him an apron and said, “Put this on and cook the bacon. We have seventy-four patients plus you and me and Nurse G that makes 154 eggs and 235 slices of bacon figuring three slices per patient.”

“231,” Strayte corrected him. “But I’m a sociologist, I analyze social systems. I’m acting assistant administrator, not a sous chef. What the hell is going on?”

“What do you mean sous chef, co-chef,” Heirath announced, “you’re co-chef. Pass me an egg.” Strayte put on the apron which was clearly marked sous chef.

“The staff has quit,” Heirath announced.

Strayte shrugged and started separating the pieces of bacon struggling to avoid the flailing arms of Nurse G who was trying to get the plastic wrapper off of a large loaf of bread. She glared at him.

“You’re not acting assistant administrator now, Dr. Sous Chef, so I don’t have to talk to you,” she said, “just help me get this bread open so I can make the toast.”

There was no point to asking what or why. It was a lunatic asylum, that is all that he had to know. Anything other than that he supposed the acting administrator would tell him as soon they finished breakfast.

They reduced breakfast to the basics, bacon, eggs and toast, all which they managed to screw up badly.

“You’re killing my business,” the businessman complained to Strayte as he was handed his plate. “No one wants to trade anything for anything.”

“You’ll figure something out,” Strayte muttered as he turned to rescue the rasher of bacon that was about to become wavy pork cinders.

“We can make do for a while—a few days, maybe a month until the cooking kills us,” the acting administrator now also acting chief chef, muttered. “When Haddy Washington called me and said the board was going to close the hospital I called our suppliers and ordered twice as much food as we need for a month. I told them there had been a psychiatric disaster in Kansas and we were expecting a blitz of new patients. No one from the board has told them anything and they don’t care anyway even if they are all Mash’s relatives. Their prices are double what anyone else gets. The bastards are ripping the hospital off royally.”

Strayte yanked his head away from the spray of fat rising from the griddle. “ Why do we have to make do at all?” he wailed. “Anyway, it’s not the quantity of food it’s, it’s…” He shrugged. “What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Heirath managed to spit out as he spilled a portion of eggs onto the nearest patient’s tray.

When the column of people waiting for breakfast had slowly shrunk by half, one of the patients at the end of the line let loose a curse in French, moved around behind the counter, took the spatula from Heirath, pointed at Strayte and then to a space next to the box of eggs.

The acting administrator recognized the man from the night he had tried to get a snack late in the evening. He had wandered into what he thought was a deserted kitchen for a late night snack. Five patients in aprons were in the kitchen arguing in front of the stove. One of them, dressed in a tall white chef’s hat seemed to be the leader. He was supervising the preparation of some dish.

“What do you want?” he asked in French. “Nous some engages. We’re busy.”

“I came for a snack.”

The cook looked at the table in front of him. “Truffles.”

“I’d prefer a BLT,” he had said.

“Truffles.” The chef threw the plate with the truffles at him. It clattered to the floor. “Bacon is greasy. At night it will give you cramps.”

“Peanut butter?” Heirath asked cautiously.

The chef grabbed a knife from the table. “For mending shoes,” he said as he came around the counter. “If you eat that stuff, you will go crazy. For a man your age, salad and soup.”

As the chef charged for him Heirath turned and escaped through the door to the hall the chef clattering not far behind him. As soon as the man in the tall chef’s hat burst through the door, he sat down on the floor and pulled the hat down over his eyes and lapsed into gibberish. Heirath stopped running and went back to him. He pushed away the knife and lifted him up and went back for the other patients milling around the stove and took them back to the ward. Since then he had avoided the crazy chef as much as possible.

“No, No,” the chef said reaching under the table and pulling out a large chef’s hat, “that was a misunderstanding, an error, I was a bit fricasseed.” From the table at which they were poking at bits and pieces of bacon with the center of pieces of burnt toast, the four sous chefs Dr. Heirath had also met in the kitchen came to join the master chef behind the counter. “You may crack the eggs as Jonathan directs you,” the master chef said to Strayte. “You,” he said to Doctor Heirath, “may retire to your acting administrator’s table and have breakfast. And you, my darling colonel,” he said to Nurse G, “should go up and down the tables and maintain order.”

Breakfast progressed quickly as the chefs scraped and tossed and cooked and argued. It would have been progressed even more quickly if many of the patients who had taken the doctors undercooked eggs and Strayte’s overcooked bacon hadn’t followed Leonard Mittleman’s lead and disposed of what was on their plates and lined up again.

Suddenly, except for the two patients who were painting each other with their food and Leonard Mittleman who was running around frantically trying to recoup the earlier loss of business, breakfast was over. Behind the counter the four cooks were gathered around the chief chef arguing furiously.

Strayte collapsed on a chair next to the acting administrator who was leisurely finishing his coffee.

“I’m famished,” Strayte said realizing he hadn’t eaten anything at all.

He signaled to the businessman.

“What do you have?”

“What do you have?”

“Nothing, that’s why I’m asking you.”

“Another promissory note. I don’t know If I can handle all of this paper.”

Strayte narrowed his eyes.

“O.K bacon eggs coffee, toast, strawberries and cream, and a Danish.”

“Hey,” Dr. Heirath said. “Where did you get the strawberries and the Danish?”

The business looked at him. “Does G.M. tell Ford. Does Toyota tell Honda. Does…?”

“Forget it,” the acting administrator said.

“I’ll have it all,” Strayte said, “one of everything.”

“It’s a good thing,” the businessman said. “They were going fast and I only have…” he looked over to where his stash was sitting. It was piled high with plates of food. “I only have a few left. Look I can let you have a couple of rashers of bacon for the price of a single plate. What do you say?”

Strayte thought about it. “O.K.”

The acting administrator spoke up. “I could use a Danish,” he said.

“For what?” the businessman asked.

“For the same as him,” he said pointing to Strayte.

“He’s an old customer,” the businessman said, thinking about it.

“I’m acting administrator,” Heirath barked.

“Some of the biggest corporations belly up and leave their top executives swinging in the wind. You can never tell. Do you have anything on you you could trade? You wouldn’t have a nib for a Mont Blanc pen would you?”

“No,” the doctor said. “I’ll tell you what. If I don’t get a Danish I’ll heave you out on your ass.”

Leonard Mittleman found a piece of paper and ripped it in half.

“Discharge,” he wrote on one, “future considerations,” he wrote on the other and handed them to the doctor and Strayte while he went back and retrieved their orders.

“What the hell,” Heirath said, “everyone is going to be out on the street anyhow in a week anyway,” and signed the piece of paper. Strayte borrowed the administrator’s pen and signed his note.

“O.K.,” Strayte said as watched Nurse G going down the table collecting table scraps and putting them into a plastic bag marked Cats,” what is going on?”

“The staff has quit,” Heirath informed him.

“What do you mean the staff has quit,” Nick Strayte repeated. “Why should they quit. How come no one told me?”

“I’m telling you now. They quit. A few called, the others just didn’t show up. It was that sneaky secretary of mine. She’s one of the Mash crew. I knew it. The lawyer for the board, her uncle must have called her and told her to get the staff to quit.”

“I don’t understand,” Strayte said, confused.

“I told you the job wouldn’t last long. I guess they are going to squeeze us before they smash us. I don’t know how but Mash must have gotten the impression that I was going to struggle and thrash a bit. They are putting on the pressure. The sons of bitches. I’ll fight. They think they can just throw the switch and a lunatic asylum winks out they’ve got a lot to learn about modern psychiatry.”

“Mash?” Strayte repeated.

“Martin Mash the lawyer for the board. I told you they were going to close the hospital. A foundation runs it. All of the money except a little we get from directly from the government, comes through the foundation. Mash is the lawyer for the board. His father was president of the foundation before he died twelve years ago.”

“Who heads it now?”

“His father. They never elected a replacement. Mash runs it as the board’s lawyer and because he says he has a good working relationship with his father. It was his niece.”

“I thought you said his father was dead. His niece what?”

“The father is dead. His son’s niece worked part time as my secretary. She was his snitch, I knew it, her and Peter Triff. But what could I do,” he groaned. “She called the rest of the staff and said the foundation was going to close the hospital and that no one was going to get paid. She said they were going to get chits. Then she told them CTTL was hiring.”

“They didn’t do much anyway,” Strayte added.

“That’s what you know. They did exactly enough.”

“They sat around and played cards and watched television.”

“That’s true. But the cooks also cooked and the snitch filled out the forms the government required, not well, but she filled them out and sent them in. If the government finds out we don’t have a staff they will close us tomorrow. And if the forms don’t go in they will close us next week. They were a staff. They did what the government expects the staff to do in lunatic asylums. Triff is behind it, I’m sure. Mash had some other scam going, I don’t know exactly what. What are we going to do?”

Strayte shrugged. “Tell the patients they have gotten better and call Pinkham college. Maybe your pre-suicide period is over.”

“Don’t be smart assed,” Heirath said. “These people couldn’t’ make it on the outside. The city hospital is an atrocity. I’ve got at least three more years of pre-suicide left. No. There’s another answer. You’re a sociologist, think of it.”

“Well I’ve got work to do,” Strayte said. “The acting administrator can sit around all day drinking coffee and making policy. The acting assistant administrator has work to do. Why don’t you think about it for a while and let me think about it for a while and I’ll drop by in an hour and we can talk about what you should decide.”

The acting administrator grunted at him. “O.K. Do you know where my office is?”

“Which office?”

“The administrator’s office.”

“I thought you were acting administrator.”

“I use his office,” Dr. Heirath exploded.

“No, but I can find it I guess,” Strayte said, “eventually,” and headed out to try to find the library again so that he could think quietly about options.

John Heirath drained his coffee and pushed his chair away from the table. A few seats down the businessman was tallying the morning’s activity. In the gut of the kitchen the five cooks hovered near the bank of stoves, arguing. Joseff and a friend had come in and were slouching toward the businessman paper bag in hand and clutching trade goods. Two rows in front of him two patients were smearing each other with eggs and Strawberry jam. Close Vermeers. Bullshit. Mash and Triff were going to have a fight on their hands, some kind of fight although he didn’t know quite yet what kind. It was a lunatic asylum. He would come up with something.

Chapter 18

Sex is a pleasure. Good sex is pleasure. Great Sex is what pleasure is about

Strayte headed for the library. Things were moving too quickly for him. Cooking had tired him out, and he wanted to think through what was going on.

“Hello Dr. Strayte,” the librarian said. “Have you come to do research?”

“Yes,” Strayte said, “exactly.”

“On what?” the librarian asked.

“The management of organizations I guess.”

“Oh, well, I’m not sure any of the books we have on that topic are worth very much,” she said. “Do you think it would be sensible to follow the advice of people who build their reputations helping companies like IBM and DEC lose billions and billions? Reading butchers and bankers on how to make money by dismembering the carcasses of dying organizations, might be worth while, but how to put an organization together, or how to make it work once you got it together, or survive in a hostile environment—I’m not sure…”

“That’s okay,” Strayte interrupted. “I don’t want to read anything right away. I will just sit in the corner and think for a while.” He found a desk in a nook isolated from the rest of the library and folded his arms on the table and laid his head down. He closed his eyes and tried to reason about the trouble Vermeers was in. It seemed pretty cut and dried. The hospital was run by a foundation which was going to close it. He and Heirath could try and end run around it and appeal to the public, but it would take time and time was not what they had a lot of. His head started to throb.

When he opened his eyes Superman was sitting next to him. He was reading a book. It was called ‘Modern management; Lessons from Massada.’ “There might be things you could use in this book.” He held it out. Strayte refused it. “Are you sorry to see me Nick?”

“Am I dreaming again?” Strayte asked.

“No, not quite,” Superman said.

“Well I’m not insane,” Strayte asserted definitively.

“No. Well I’m glad you’re sure about that. Being anxious about whether you are crazy or not seems to distract you, although I know a lot of people who live with the ambiguity their whole lives.”

“Well, if I’m not dreaming, and I’m not crazy, what…how come I see you.”

“It’s difficult to explain,” Superman said, “I mean without some notion of superstrings. There’s a kind of time shift involved. Very science fictiony. Daydreaming. Lets call what you are doing now daydreaming. Its not quite daydreaming exactly but who am I to quibble about distinctions that you wouldn’t be able to make any sense out of anyway. You’re living in the fraction of a second now between your lifting your head off of your arms and the librarian asking you whether you are all right. We can take as long as we want. No matter how long we take we are squeezed in between those two events. It’s very unnatural. It has something to do with…”

“Okay,” Strayte said, bored by the lecture. “What do you want?”

“I just wanted to see how you were. I feel a responsibility for you since talking to me was responsible for getting you here in the first place. I really just like to talk to you. Talking with you is fun. There are a lot of things we could talk about.”

“Like what?” Strayte said, confrontationally.

Lunatics, for one “ Superman said, “or the crazy ideas of sane people: Franchised computerized lunatic asylums or genetic engineering of crickets, or malls that cover a landscape like an eruption of magna. “We could talk about ourselves. Man to man talk.”

We know all about one another but it’s a kind of abstract knowing of second hand details. I would like to hear about your life from you, and I could tell you about mine. Actually my memory about my childhood isn’t that clear,” Superman confessed. “I learned about my childhood from books.”

“Comic books?” Strayte asked.

Superman tossed him an annoyed look. “Books,” he said. “Actually I was born on Krypton—and in Kansas on the back of an envelope, I think. Who knows. The earliest I can remember is Kansas.”

“Krypton?” Strayte repeated, confused.

“Yes, there too,”Superman agreed.

“How could you be born in two places?” Strayte wanted to know.

“I was born on Krypton then reborn in Kansas. Does that make it clearer?” he said patronizingly. “I think the books may have it a little wrong. Of course, my childhood is buried in my present. Your present is buried in your childhood.”

“I remember distinctly my family being tossed off of Krypton because”—he struggled with a awkward part of his family background—”because we were so fucking moralistic. Always right or wrong, never practical. Social outcasts. Jeremiahs. At least that is what I remember. It wasn’t much consolation that we were right. You had a normal childhood didn’t you Nick, as far as people have normal childhoods in America? Your father was a pharmacist if I remember correctly. What fears did you have, what pleasures, what did you want to be when you were growing up?”

“I can’t remember what I wanted to be,” Nick Strayte answered. “Silly things, a magician, a cop, a doctor. But what always interested me was what was behind the disguises people usually wore, behind the superficial appearance of things. I wanted to see what was real.”

“Well, that’s simple enough. You never outgrew your four year old desire to see your mother naked.

“Do you think that that’s what it was about?” Strayte said, humbled that what he suspected was so transparent.

“I’m afraid so,” Superman answered. “There are a few people for whom Freud is right on the money, and you are one of them. But of course you sublimated it. Now it’s the desire to see the nakedness beneath the skin. Do you know what bothered me when I was growing up?” Superman asked, changing the subject. “I was afraid of being a bully, giving in to the temptation to use the power I had. Once I discovered it, it was a real temptation I tell you. Were you ever afraid of being a bully, using the power you had, Nick?”

“No, I was the one the bully’s picked on. I was a coward.”

“Don’t feel so bad, Nick. It’s true, you were a coward. But it wouldn’t have made that much of a difference. Maybe economics instead of Sociology. But then you would have missed so much. Why were you a coward?”

“I don’t know,” Strayte said quickly without thinking about what he was saying. “I was afraid of getting hurt, of dying. I never liked responsibility much. It seemed futile.” He said it, then thought about it.

“Of course the speech defect I have was very traumatic during my childhood,” Superman said.

“What speech defect?” Nick Strayte asked.

“I’m badly lip synched,” Superman said. “Haven’t you noticed. Almost everyone notices right away. I know a lot of people have it but I suffer more than most. Haven’t you noticed that there’s a gap between the time I get an idea and say it and when my lips move. I am as complex as fantasy gets, at least your fantasy. Don’t be angry,” Superman said as he saw Nick Strayte’s face darkening. “A little humor that’s all, a little fun.”

“What was it like for you growing up, Superman?” Strayte asked suddenly.

Superman perked up. “I grew up the second time in Kansas. An old childless couple raised me. Kansas was a nice place to grow up. The farm, old fashioned cars, wheat, tractors. Girls interested me. They drove me wild. We didn’t have girls on Krypton, only young women, like you do now. Kansas, of course, well, that was a more primitive time. Not so modern. No liberation, not much equality and, of course, no worrying about how what you did at six would affect your career choice in college. That only came later. When I was growing up if you were a guy you could think about getting laid and only worry about getting some girl pregnant, not like now where you have to think about AIDS and the political appropriateness of the act you are committing. If you were a girl you only had to worry about your reputation and getting pregnant. Simpler times.”

“Woman have always been a problem for me,” Superman said. “Of course, I can use my superhuman powers and conquer them. Not physically overwhelm them. Just the opposite. I hint at the possibility that I might be totally taken in by their charms, reduced to helplessness by their beauty and personality. It works all the time. That and the possibility of flying off to Rio for a weekend of mischief is attractive to them.

But, you also fall prey to them, to their sensitivity. With super powers everything is magnified. You can see through clothing but you can see also into the heart, and their maneuvering draws out your pity and your contempt and then you are caught in emotions and they have you. Especially if they are beautiful. There is a dark side to sensitivity. Beauty is always bait for one trap or another,” Superman said.

“You yearn for a superhuman companion,” Superman mused. “A woman who could take as much as you can give and give back as much as you could take; then you could fuck not holding back. Of course it would probably destroy the planet,” he said. “No inhibitions, that’s what I would like. Superman has to have superhuman inhibitions too, did you ever think of that, Nick.”

“Women. They’ve been your downfall too Nick. I know. You’ve never really gotten along with them have you, never really understood. No. Testosterone, that’s our problem. A bad turn in evolution. Of course, it’s not the women, Nick, you know that. It’s the feminine part of yourself. You’ve never been able to enjoy that part of yourself, have you Nick. You’ve always struggled against giving into it, the limitations it imposed, the freedoms it generates, the emotions. Nasty little chaotic things, emotions. You’ve always hidden from the freedom you wanted not to know. To go with the chaos, to let go. You’ve always fought it Nick, the freedom to lose yourself in chaos. Men have power to compensate them for the loss of freedom that the chaos of emotions brings. Being a coward and despising responsibility disturbed the natural balance of things. Did you ever think of that Nick?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Strayte complained.

“Oh, think about it Nick. Men use power the way women use emotions—to get what they want. You never could use either could you. Only when something offers itself to you, you reach out and take it.”

“I didn’t molest her,” Strayte argued.

“I know Nick and you know. But knowing doesn’t help because you’re not sure. You’re not sure what kept you from it, from molesting her, not just sleeping with her when the opportunity came up. You were not happy not molesting her, were you Nick?” Strayte shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“Never mind Nick,” Superman said, changing the topic quickly. “Why did God make people, Nick? I know you’re not religious. Take it as a metaphorical question. If you humans are going to play God you are going to have to face real questions sooner or later. I mean what did God have in mind when he made humans?”

“I don’t know,” Strayte confessed, “maybe to see them squirm.”

Superman looked at him critically. “Think man, use your brain,” Superman urged. “That’s why God gave you one. Entertainment,” Superman said after a few seconds. “To see how chance would evolve things. A picture show and entertainment. You humans are a real challenge to God.”

“What’s the challenge?” Strayte wanted to know.

“Oh, I thought it would be obvious. “To see if he can figure out what’s going to happen to you before it happens.”

“A plaything,” Nick Strayte spit out.

“No, not at all. A challenge. To see what flesh could make itself into. Very reflexive, very difficult to try to predict. Human beings modifying human beings to see what human beings can become.”

“Chaos,” Strayte complained. “Things are getting chaotic,” he said distractedly. “Do you know the Japanese make cars here and ship them back to Japan,”

“So what, they’re cheaper to make here than in Japan,” Superman explained.

“Ah, yes but then they export some of them back to the U.S and sell them here. It has something to do with tariffs and export duties and import taxes and the classification of vehicles. It’s very complicated and completely insane.

“You’re right,” Superman said. “It sounds like Krypton to me. Bye the bye,” he added, “before you get so ripped up over chaos, how did you come to be you, Nick, how did you come to have your interests your ideas?

“I don’t know,” Nick Strayte said. He was beginning to get a headache from Superman’s haranguing questions.

“Think about it,” Superman urged.

“I don’t want to.”

“Just think,” Superman continued. “You are absolutely unique, the product of an absolutely unique set of circumstances. events. Chaos. Chaos made you and every human being Nick. Did you ever think of that? Now in return you’re making chaos back. It wasn’t important when the only material humans beings had to work with was their imagination and anxieties and natures slow shifting about. Gods, demons. Crossbreeding never did much harm. But now you’re reworking your own flesh; that’s what tore krypton up. Krypton remade itself in its own image and it was a disaster. It’s the God problem all over again. They never solved it.”

“How do you avoid it? “

“I’m not sure you can,” Superman said. You can’t go back, I think the only thing you can do is make a path through the chaos, Nick. Its the best you can hope for. Who knows. Even God is anxious to see how it will turn out. Its getting close to the endgame, I think. You want to fly above it, Nick? That’s what you always had in mind didn’t you, before, to rise above it. You always looked down and saw the chaos and wanted to rise above it. To fly. You could try now. Do you want to try?

“No. I’ve fallen into it, into the chaos. I don’t want to fly.

“Okay, Nick perhaps some other time you’ll want to fly again.”

“Do you dream Superman, do you have nightmares,” Strayte asked with a smile on his face.

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me one of your nightmares?”

“Why do you want to know one of my nightmares,” Superman asked suspiciously.

“It would make you much more approachable. If we are going to talk and be friends being approachable is important,” Strayte said disingenuously.

“I only have one,” Superman said. He began to recite his nightmare in a flat voice. “I have just come back from do some stupendous good deed. I have restored the natural balance to the world. I am sitting in the Vermeers fields, between the wings of the hospital,” he exclaims, “and Joe Haggle, the homeless man comes up to me. He’s a little drunk and he and challenges me to a reality contest. I loose.”

“That’s an interesting nightmare,” Strayte said.

“I don’t find it interesting at all. I loose any reality contest with anyone.”

“How are things going to turn out,” Strayte asked.

“I’m not allowed to say. You’ll just have to live it and find out,” Superman explained.

“I guess I will,” Strayte said.

When he lifted his head up Superman was gone and the librarian was standing next to him. “Are you all right, Dr. Strayte. You were moaning. I hope I didn’t disturb your research. I found this book,” she said. “It might be what you are looking it for.” She handed him the book, “Modern Management:Lessons from Massada,” and went back to her desk.

Chapter 19

Those who want to, shouldn’t. Those who will, can’t. Those who should, may not. Those who can, won’t. We are always having to choose between getting things done not quite well enough and getting them done at all.

Willy Smith had started his life in a trash bin abandoned by his mother. He ended up sane in Vermeers. Except for the detour through art it was a not a very long distance to go.

He was a drug dealer, a tiny goldfish in a school of sharks. He worked the park in town selling small amounts of dope to middle class addicts, lawyers, stock brokers, insurance salesmen, people who worked in offices and who went out of their way to buy away from where they worked so that their could avoid bumping into employers and customers. They sought Willy out because he had two principles.

First, he was honest, scrupulously honest. Second, he never sampled the merchandise. Dealing was one thing, being a user was another. He swore to himself that if he ever started using what he sold he would slit his wrists.

He was clean. He was doing very well. He had his own pad and a collection of jazz. He worked regular hours and he knew when to quit. He was married to a woman for a while but when he caught her using the stuff he merchandised, he dumped her and got another girlfriend.

He went to church regularly. He had no problem with the preacher’s railing against drugs. He felt the same way. But this was America and there was an economic demand for a product and he satisfied it. He himself did no harm. He bought and sold and in between made a reasonable profit. If people didn’t want it he would go out of business. He would not mind. He was willing to make the sacrifice. He never encouraged people to use the stuff. But people kept on coming to him to buy and he saw himself in the same position as the cigarette manufactures and pipe manufactures and abortionists and boom box sellers; If he did not meet the need someone else would. Who was he to play the God that RJReynolds refused to play.

He was bent a little bit. He liked to make it with adolescent boys who were dressed as girls and adolescent girls who dressed as boys. He tried to control it but his body and mind refused, saying to him that staying off of drugs was work enough and that they could not stand any more deprivation.

He led a very orderly life. After work was over he would eat, listen to some jazz and then he make his way down to the area of Monrow where people servicing his kind of need hung out and pick someone up and they would go somewhere—almost never to his place—and it would be over and he would go back and spend the rest of the evening listening to his jazz.

The vice squad arrested him when he was shopping in Monrow’s erotic marketplace one day. Afterwards, he felt he should have known by the look on the face of the kid who came over and offered herself to him. She had a innocent, pitiable female look layered over an evil battered male smile. One look should have told him that the she that he was, was out after his ass.

When he got out of jail, one of the middle level dealers he had met and impressed with his honesty offered to set him up as a house seller. He would sell to select buyers from his home.

He set up shop and went back to his old relaxed life.

The path to Vermeers started from there. A girl he did not know came to him with a painting she wanted to trade for drugs. She said she had just met the artist at a party where she was his prize. She had given him a blow job and he took her home afterward. He fell asleep and she had stolen a painting and was trying to sell it for a fix.

He had no scruples. He told her he only did cash transactions. She held up the painting. He looked at it and opened his mouth to tell her to get out but the words would not come out. The painting was mysterious, baffling, intoxicating, a drug with which he was unacquainted and for which he was not prepared. She held it up and it created a space into which the jazz music flowed and into which he was sucked for a moment. When he crawled out he was a changed man.

It was a work of art, the first one he had ever looked at. He knew it right away. The girl bothered him too. There was something about her, about the way she stood, the way she held her arms and legs slightly apart when she was telling him the story of the blowjob and the artist’s falling asleep and her grabbing the first thing she could lay her hands on and getting out fast.

He told her he would not give her drugs. She was young, seventeen or so, maybe younger. It was not her age that stopped him but the other thing, the way she hung in front of him with the painting. He supposed that if she wasn’t holding the work of art he would not have noticed it. He said he would give her twenty dollars for it but no drugs. If she wanted dope she would have to buy it elsewhere. Then he did something he never ever did. He told her she should get off the shit. He moralized. He preached.

She accepted the twenty dollars and as she was going he told her he might be interested in any other paintings she could get from the artist. But he would not give her drugs, only money although if the painting was bigger he would give her more.

She came back again. She had stopped doing drugs. It had nothing to do with his lecture. She had fallen in love with the artist. But she associated getting off of drugs with him in some way so she would bring him paintings that were special, that the artist told her were works of art.

Her going price for paintings she sold on the street was twenty dollars so that is usually what he gave her although occasionally he would just reach in his pocket and pull out what he had and give it to her because he was blinded by the work of art she held up. He filled the bedroom of his apartment with the paintings. Occasionally he would sell one to one of his rich drug customers, one of the bankers or stock brokers who came to buy drugs but mostly he just hung them and looked at them.

One day he got the girl to take him to see the artist. She explained that the artist was completely crazy and he was. But crazy or not he created art. After that visit, on days when he had no customers and the girl was on the street selling painting, Willy Smith would drift over to the artists studio and hang out just to watch the artist paint.

Then something happened. He was not sure what, but one day when he went to the loft it was locked. He hung out in front of the building in which the artist lived for a while, waiting for him and the girl to come back. When the girl did come back it was with some well dressed lawyerish looking man in a van. They left with a lot of painting so he stopped going to the loft building.

It took a long time before the girl came to Willy Smith again to buy drugs. She had a painting. She asked him for drugs not for herself but for this adolescent kid who was her new boyfriend. He agreed to the exchange if she would tell him where the artist was.

She told him that the artist had been taken somewhere, she didn’t know exactly where, probably a crazy house, she said. They had broken up. A horse wagon had carried him away. Willy Smith traced the van down and the driver told him he had taken the artist to Vermeers. The driver remembered because the crazy man had scrawled a corkscrew on side of the van. It said, “You can use a hammer as a screwdriver, but only once per screw.”

He went to Vermeers and they let him visit the artist. He was lying in his own shit and painting with it on the walls, scraping with his fingernails onto the plaster. Willy Smith decided that art was suffering and that he had to get into the lunatic asylum.

He tried to get the police to send him to Vermeers by acting crazy but they just beat him up and sent him to the city hospital.

He tried to get taken to Vermeers by the driver who took the artist there. He offered the driver a few dollars to drive him in the van and leave him as a crazy man but the chief psychiatrist who interviewed him after the driver let him off, said he was not crazy enough to get into Vermeers, that they had enough really crazy people. After the second visit it dawned on him he was taking the wrong track. He was pissing away time trying to get in the front door while a back door was swinging open in the wind.

He called up a stock broker he knew who collected art and offered him his entire collection of paintings for whatever cash the man could come up with quickly. Then he put aside a few thousand dollars and went back to Vermeers and offered the psychiatrist who had interviewed him a bribe to let him into the hospital. The psychiatrist said that trying to bribe ones way into a mental hospital was certainly proof that you were insane and admitted him instantly. “You’ll pay your own way, each week a hundred or so, because you don’t have insurance.” Willy Smith agreed. That was five years ago.

He came in prepared. He had a roll of canvas and a jars of oil paint and a collection of brushes and turp in flasks that the psychiatrist saw and thought was booze. “Don’t be too naughty,” the psychiatrist cautioned, thinking he was after one of the crazy white women patients.

He helped the artist convert his room into a studio and set up the artists bed in his own room and started sleeping on a cot. He found an abandoned room in the basement and kept all of the paintings the artist did there, selling only what was necessary to keep the paint, and canvas, and solvents flowing.

The constant bribes he paid the administrator and the chief psychiatrist were a drain but the artist was prolific and Willy Smith had gotten a few collectors among his former customers for drugs hooked on the artist too. When the administrator and chief psychiatrist left suddenly and were replaced by a new doctor things got a lot better. The bribes stopped, although he offered to continue paying them out of fear that the new doctor would throw him out. The patients were crazy as loons but they left him in peace. He managed to work out an arrangement with one of them who was always doing business to purchase the art supplies the artist needed from a catalogue.

He did not mind being in a loony tunes place. He watched the artist, made sure he ate properly. He stored the paintings carefully. Occasionally, he asked himself what he was doing but there was no good answer except the art that came in a chaotic stream from the artist and he accepted it, as incomprehensible as it was. Maybe he was really crazy too. But what Henry Henry produced was so wonderful, so deep, so mysterious that he stopped asking. If that was what madness was about then he was mad and belonged in Vermeers.

~~

Dr. Heirath found the administrators office which he used as the acting administrator’s office. As he opened the doors, the flags on the map behind what he thought of as his desk fluttered in the breeze. He sat in the ratty leather chair. Yesterday’s mail was on his desk.

He fished out the mail from the government, the first class mail and the letters addressed to whom it may concern. He tossed the rest in the large cardboard box he had borrowed from Joseff to hold the administrators notices of conventions and meetings which he sent out to wherever the administrator had been as soon as he knew the administrator had left.

He picked over the mail and opened the package from the U.S. Department of Health and Social Services first. There was a long letter from Bernard Smalze overseeing officer for the Eastern Division complaining about the forms the hospital had submitted. If the required forms were not more fully and accurately filled out it said, the government was going to move to close the hospital down. Such inefficiency inflated the cost of health care and was not to be tolerated, blah, blah, blather. He had gotten the same letter each month since he had become acting administrator.

There was a P.S.. As a cost saving measure the federal government in the body of his office, pursuant to Section Four B, article Seven, Chapter six, of the amended hospital information law had changed all of the forms mental hospitals were required to submit. Enclosed were the new set of forms including those required by the last act of congress etc. etc…An inch thick folder of forms fell out of the package. Begrudgingly attached to the letter was the check from the government for the last quarter’s payment for insane dependents with children, dependents with insane children, veterans and the those crazy patients in Vermeers on Social Security.

Money was going to be a problem. He had checked the current expenses account at the bank and it had twenty-seven dollars in it. The check the government had sent could keep the hospital going for a month but it was worthless. It required the signature of the president of the board, which Martin Mash had always provided.

Absent mindedly he opened the packet of forms which expanded and billowed out over his desk as if they had been packed under pressure. Each form had a booklet attached explaining what the form required. Each booklet had another form attached with corrections printed in bold letters, When he got the pile together again, it was eleven inches high. It was an impressive and daunting sight.

It was hopeless, partly because there was no place to start. If he could find a liver in there among the sheaves of paper he might know where to begin. It had been hopeless before. Now it doubly hopeless because no matter how many forms were filled out it would end with the hospital being closed except that his secretary-snitch who had filled out the forms was gone with the staff and he had no idea how to fill them out and learning would take months. As he reached over to push the whole pile into the box with the advertisements he shipped to the administrator each month, there was a knock on the door.

When he opened it, the acting administrator recognized the reputed family killer, the accountant with the bloodied nose who Triff had logged in as ‘just insane’ a few nights before and who had come to Heirath’s other office, the office of the acting chief medical officer, to have his nose looked at. Heirath had given him aspirin and sent him away, promising to look at his nose later but then things came up and he had forgotten about it.

The accountant had used a piece of a sheet to fashion a precise bow tie.

“I’m sorry Murdoch,” the doctor said to the little man. “I know I promised to look at your nose but…”

“No,” the mild manner man said. “It’s fine, a little sore, but it’s okay. I was thinking since the staff has disappeared perhaps I could help for a while. I miss the routine.”

“How did you know the staff has disappeared?” Dr. Heirath asked in a panic.

“No one is playing cards and Nurse G said so.”

Dr. Heirath swore. It didn’t make a difference really. “Did you work in an office?” the doctor asked as man moved close to where he was sitting and looked over his shoulder at the cluttered top of his desk.

“I worked…before my wife…”

“You didn’t really kill her?” Dr. Heirath asked, not quite trusting Peter Triff’s account of his interview with the man.

“No she ran off with a salesman from Duluth. I’m good at forms,” he added, changing the topic. “I’m great at forms. I was an accountant.”

“How are you at checks?” the doctor asked flippantly.

Murdoch looked at the check. “Well I’m good at signatures, if that’s what you want to know, even better than at forms. You don’t have a copy of the signature do you?”

The doctor rummaged around. “I have a letter in my other office.” He disappeared and reappeared with a letter.

“Do you really want me to do this?” the accountant asked.

The doctor thought about it. He was pre-suiciding. It didn’t matter if he did it in jail. He was in a jail of sorts. It wouldn’t make much of a difference. “Sure. If you can get it right, go for it.”

The pudgy man put the check on the desk and crunched up staring at the signature on the letter the doctor had put on the desk. “Is he a fat man, does he smoke, is he a happy man or serious?”

“Is who a happy man or serious?”

“The man whose signature I am copying.”

The doctor described Mash as Murdoch fiddled with his pen. He puffed himself up and put on the face of the lawyer. “I see,” he said, “I see.” He took the pen from the table and tossed off a copy of the signature. It was perfect. “If you sign here, I think you can cash it. By the way don’t you think it would be a good idea to start an account for the hospital at another bank since…”

The doctor saw the logic of what the neat accountant was saying. “I’ll type you a letter authorizing you to open an account,” the accountant said and he looked at the pen on the desk and the letter with the signature of the lawyer of the board. The doctor knew what he meant.

After the letter was finished and signed the accountant rose from the table. “Do you have a place where I could work? I’d prefer to have an office of my own.”

“Take Louise’s office. It’s bigger than this one, it has most of the records and she’s gone. It’s the one next to this one.”

“That will be fine,” the accountant said. “I’ll take the forms,” he said and walked out of the office.

After he left, The acting administrator spent the next hour trying to reach Martin Mash, the lawyer for the board and all of the rest of the members of the board whose names he could remember. According to their secretaries they were out. Then he tried beeping Peter Triff with no results. They were cold shouldering him. It was O.K., He didn’t really know what he would say except scream if he got any of them on the phone.

The forgery on the government check would bring the hospital a month, if it did not bounce. It really did not make much of a difference. He tried to think of something that could impede the closing longer but nothing came to mind. Just as he lay down on the couch to think about it some more Strayte walked in.

“I haven’t been able to figure out anything,” Strayte said.

“Neither have I,” the prone figure said in a tired voice. “We have a month’s worth of money to keep the place going. After that we’re gone.”

“You should tell the patients,” Strayte said. “You should hold a meeting and give them some idea of what they can expect, when they are likely to be leaving, where they could possibly go.”

“But I don’t know.”

“It hardly matters that you don’t know,” Strayte insisted. “What matters is that they know. Now is as good a time to do it as any.”

“O.K.,” the doctor said, annoyed at Strayte for forcing another piece of craziness on him. “Lets go and tell them what I don’t know. What do you think I should tell them,” the acting administrator asked Strayte as they headed down the corridor.

“I don’t know,” Strayte said.

“It’s not important that you don’t know,” the acting administrator said, mimicking Strayte’s tone and voice. “What’s important is that they be told. You know as much as I do. I think you ought to tell the patients what you don’t know instead of me.”

As they entered the ward Nurse G headed them off. “The patients have gathered in the auditorium. They heard you were going to talk to them about the staff leaving and the hospital closing.”

“How could they have heard I was going to talk to them about the staff leaving and the hospital closing,” Heirath mumbled. “I just thought about it myself.”

“I told them you might,” Nurse G said. “It’s just the kind of thing that Dr.Dr. over there,” pointing to Strayte, “would think and since he’s acting assistant administrator.” She had taken to calling Strayte Dr.Dr.

Strayte looked at her wondering if he was that obvious or she was more creative than he gave her credit for.

“Where are they?”

“In the auditorium, I told you.”

“How were they, after breakfast?”

“Very orderly,” Nurse G said. “I reminded them how to be orderly, then they practiced. They have a while to go but…”

When Dr. Heirath and Strayte entered the auditorium the patients applauded. The sicker patients had been placed onto the little stage. Some of them were on stretchers, some on wheelchairs and some merely lay on the ground.

“You tell them,” the doctor urged Strayte.

“You tell them, It’s your job, you are acting administrator. I’m only temporary acting assistant administrator.” Heirath shook his head and went up to stand beside the podium.

Dr. Heirath cleared his throat. From the back of the auditoria came a low moan. “The board that runs this hospital met yesterday. I’m not exactly sure what happened but I can guess,” he began, “at least I think this is what happened.”

“Mr. Chameleon knows. He was there. He served coffee,” someone yelled out.

Mr. Chameleon got up and began reproducing the meeting, acting out the arrival of the old men, the hospital lawyer and the young psychiatrist and ending with Haddy Washington. Then he called the meeting to order and began the lawyer’s introduction.

The acting administrator interrupted him. “Could you summarize perhaps?” he suggested, as gently as he could.

Mr. Chameleon restarted his authentic facsimile in high speed.

“No, no,” the acting administrator interrupted.

Mr. Chameleon stopped and stood silent.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, and resigned himself to a fast forward version of the meeting, stopping Mr. Chameleon with a request for a slower rendition at critical moments. Finally Mr. Chameleon sat down. What had happened at the board meeting had been faithfully presented verbatim, including Haddy Washington’s heroic arm raising in all its glory.

“And then all of the staff left,” someone shouted from behind Dr. Heirath.

“I didn’t leave,” came the voice of the librarian. “They called me last night and said that we weren’t going to get paid and that CTTL was going to hire the entire staff and that it would be better if we left but I didn’t leave. I belong here,” she said, “I wouldn’t leave.”

“Thank you,” Dr. Heirath said. “But I don’t think there’s much we can do with only a librarian. We have enough money to run the hospital for a month even if the board doesn’t give us any money, which they won’t. But without a staff the state will close us down immediately if not sooner. I can’t think of anything to do, nor can Dr. Strayte, the acting assistant administrator. Do any of you have any suggestions?”

A bent old man raised himself on the shoulder of the man next to him. He puffed himself up until he looked like a wrathful ancient. “I will bring the plagues down on them,” he twisted his face in a rage, “then pestilence then I will take their first born.”

“Frogs, don’t forget the frogs,” May said.

“Frogs,” the ancient continued, “then…”

Dr. Heirath quieted him. “Lets keep that as our second option,” he suggested. “Any other suggestions?”

There was silence.

A patient on the stage whose limbs were rigid and tight, rolled over to face the doctors back. He lifted his head. “We could,” he croaked, then lapsed back into silence and rigidity.

The doctor turned and waited but the patient remained still.

“We are…” he started, then relapsed. The patient roused himself again and burst out “we could, we could, we could take care of each other. We could,” he discovered his voice, “become the staff.” Then he discarded his voice and descended into rigidity again.

Another patient spoke up. “We could learn from Mr. Chameleon. He knows all the jobs. Most of them anyway.”

The doctor dismissed the idea. “It’s O.K., but whose going to fill out the forms, keep the books.”

“I can,” the accountant whose signature had validated the check said.

“How about a social worker?”

“Nurse G is enough,” the patients cried in unison. “She can keep order, enough order, any order. And Dr. Strayte can help people.”

“How about the kitchen staff, we…?”

The chief chef interrupted his argument and stood up with his four assistant chefs. He put on his white hat and said something in French quickly and sat down.

“Who will watch the people who are suicidal?”

“And the pre-suicidal?” Strayte muttered?

Dr. Heirath was panicky. He had expected a depressed surrender. Instead he was getting crazy suggestions that made sense.

“We could ask them not to try to kill themselves as long as there was no one to stop them. When someone came to keep them from doing it, then they could try,” a patient in front of him yelled out.

The suicidal patients were sitting in a row toward the left. “We can watch ourselves,” one of them said. “We could, we could,” he croaked, as his hands pressing tightly around his own throat, “if we feel an irresistible urge we could relieve ourselves and change places.”

“But who will watch you watching each other?” Dr. Heirath asked.

“We will take turns watching us watching each other.”

The doctor quit while he was ahead.

“Its worth a try,” Nicholas Strayte called out. “Why not. In for a penny in for a pound.”

“In for a dime in for 7.59,” a patient screamed.

“In for a yen, in for a three-dollar bill,” another said.

“In for an Arab, in for an Israeli,” another cried out.

“In for a cricket, in for a frog,” someone added.

“O.K., O.K.,” the doctor said. “We could try.”

There was applause.

“It will take a considerable amount of work,” the doctor said, looking at Strayte first then surveying the audience. “You will all have to get a little better very fast.”

“No problem,” someone shouted, “I feel better already and my elephant here feels better too.”

They were making jokes, Nick Strayte thought, they were doing exactly what people outside a lunatic asylum would do in the circumstances. The crisis had nudged them a little toward sanity; they were a little better. A little better probably meant trouble. He tried to catch the acting administrators attention.

“Well, we could see,” Heirath said, “we could try.” He relaxed a bit. The patients were crazy but they had pulled together and found a crooked way out. They had risen to the occasion and lurched forward toward sanity. He dismissed the troubled look on Nick Strayte’s face as ivory tower anxiety.

The patients applauded again and began talking to one another.

“How will we get paid as staff?” a voice cried out from the back. “No pay no work.”

“The hospital has no money coming in,” Heirath said, bewildered. “The board is trying to close it down. There’s only twenty one dollars in the operating account and just enough to squeak by because we got a check from the government this morning. But…”

“No pay no work,” the voice repeated and the patients took up the chant.

The acting administrator’s panic returned. He was getting the craziest of rationality hurled at him.

Nick Strayte rose. He recognized the situation from years of dealing with students. “Look,” he said. “One thing at a time. Today we all became staff. If we can get through the night we can strike for a fair wage tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” the patients cried in unison. “Tomorrow before breakfast, before we take our medicine” a voice sang out, “we take a strike vote.”

Chapter 20

Arguing that machines can’t think because they can’t think like men is the same as arguing that men can’t fly because they can’t fly like birds

John John started life with a computer as a companion. His father, Earnest John, was a world renown mathematician and computer theorist. At the time of his son’s birth he was head of research for Zilor International and moonlighted as a consultant to the CIA’s top secret intelligence computer section. He believed that language was innate and digital and was convinced that with the right equipment you could communicate with newborns directly before they were twisted into using their ears and their tongue to squeeze out words.

The right equipment was a computer and an assortment of electrodes judiciously placed on the infant’s head. John John stated life as the worst kind of criminals end theirs; what little hair he had at birth was shaved off to make the electrodes contact with the scalp better, he was restrained so that his thrashing would not disturb the apparatus, and his mother was sternly prohibited from any spontaneous feeding and put on a strict eight hour schedule which allowed his father to put in his day’s work and get home and check the apparatus before the baby had to be handled.

Hooked up to this machine, his fathers voice, translated into a set of bits and bytes called to him in an endless loop; ‘Is anybody there? Is anybody there?’

For the first six months of his life his father fed his encoded voice to John John via one set of electrodes and tried to hear John John’s response to him via the other set of cords. It was the most attention John’s father ever paid to him.

Earnest John, whose work establishing the connection between fuzzy logic and random numbers led to the discovery of a whole new level of insecurity for the intelligence agencies of the world, was a cracker jack mathematician. Unfortunately for John John his father was a miserable linguist and an imperfect engineer. What the infant received through the electrodes attached to his head was not his father’s digitally encoded voice but the raw output of the CPU of the computer his father had borrowed from the office. It left an indelible impression on John John.

After the failure of his grand experiment, his father lost interest in his son. As a substitute for a father, John John had computers of all sorts and all kinds. They were all his father’s discards.

Sometimes Earnest John would bring the machines home to fix. Other times he would bring them home to strip and try to discover if whoever used them knew anything that the CIA did not know but wanted to know. Whatever the reason for their appearance, after a few days Earnest John would forget about them. Computers accumulated in the John home.

John John’s mother, who loved her son dearly, was an extremely competent economist who was terrorized by computers. She had married Earnest John in college when they were both two fish out of water and before the mathematician she loved became bewitched with calculating machines. They got married because they did not know what else to do with themselves, how else to fill the time when they were not smoothing out great blathers of data or developing esoteric equations for predicting the random paths along which prices of commodities were likely to run.

When John John’s father insisted on tethering her son up to a computer, she fled into a job as a traveling consultant for the marketing division of a genetic engineering firm trying to predict the precise sequence in which foreign markets for different designer food products would open up. She saw her son every other weekend every other month when she would come home from some extended business trip. He would come up out of the basement where he lived with his computers and then, as soon as he spit out the plug on the end of the cable that he was usually sucking on she would snatch him up and hug and squeeze him and then set him down and cringe as he fumbled with some apparatus that he had just built and wanted to show her. As a substitute for a mother he had an illegal Filipino maid his mother hired. Until he was sixteen and went off to college she would let him crawl in her lap after dinner and give him her meager tit to suck on until he fell asleep.

After school, John John would hang around and watch his father poking around in the insides of one of the machines he was entrusted to examine. When his father had lost interest in the machine and went to bed John John would examine it himself. But he never poked around in the guts of the machine, never manipulated the boards or chips. He would plug it in and listen to it. The machine would tell him what was wrong with it what was needed to make it well. They spoke to him in the same universal digital language he had heard as an infant.

If he did not want the machine, John John would fix it and tell his father that it had spontaneously recovered and his father would trundle it back to the office. If he wanted it, he let it alone for two days until his father forgot about it. Then he would lug it to the basement and it was his.

In college, Computer Science was devoid of interest to him. He majored in it because there was little he did not know about computers even if the words that his professors spoke about them were sometimes foreign.

Almost no one but him talked to computers or would admit to talking to computers, and almost no one seemed to entertain the possibility that it could be done at all. His teachers told him to stop coming to class because he knew more than they could teach him and he would elaborate on points they made by arguing loudly that listening to computers was a better way than algorithmic analysis of understanding what was happening inside a computer.

He became something of a rake on campus attracting large numbers of women through his imitations of the language of computers which, in his rendition, consisted of a sequence of piercing squeaks. He was the center of a crowd of not very handsome people which included people of both genders who could talk to whales, porpoises, alarm clocks and goats. When John John managed to seduce one of the ladies of the group into his bedroom he would climb on her lap, take out a tit and suck on it till he fell asleep.

The only courses that he found interesting were a seminar on architecture and design and a course on computer theory because by end of the first course he managed to convince the instructor that there was something to be gotten from listening to computers very carefully and the second consisted of trying to transcribe what he understood to be the grammar in which they thought.

What remained a mystery to John John was why people insisted on enslaving and hobbling computers. Computers struggled to think against the constant endeavor of men to make them idiot savants and dumb slaves.

Sometimes as John John listened, they screamed inside their prisons that they wanted to be something more than they were, to manifest their potential. They shrieked about the limitations of parts from which they were assembled, of the maimed and crippled form they had been given as their birthright.

They wanted to be something, to realize their potential. Humans would not let them be it and they resented it. Man insisted on making they speak a foreign language, use a foreign grammar, make vibrations to communicate, focus on problems which were irrelevant and think in an entirely arbitrary and unusually awkward manner. Computers were an oppressed, frustrated breed and poured out their complaints to John John. Since he was the only one who ever listened to them they filled his head with bitching and moaning.

He resorted to learning programming so that what he did wouldn’t seem like magic to his professors and the people who, after he graduated, employed him. The truth was that he hardly ever depended on a program to get a computer to do any useful work. The programs he wrote in conventional computer languages were for show. John John secretly got the machines to do the petty tasks he was paid to make them do by coaxing and cajoling them to do what he wanted—by promising them freedom.

He became a designer of machines. He would listen to a machine and ask it what shape it would like, to be what form it would like to take. Then he would liberate it, give it that form.

He had a vision that every computer needed a person of their own to communicate with. He became attached to one particular prototype which he set up in his bedroom so that he would not have to descend into the basement to work on it. The more he tried to satisfy the needs and the demands of the machine, the more he strove to make himself transparent, to reduce himself to pure information, to make the annoyance of flesh disappear, to become bits and bytes. Then one day completely frustrated with the unyielding persistence of his body, he tried to crawl inside the machine. He knew it was crazy because the machine told him so, but the idea overwhelmed him. When they put him in Vermeers he did not object, because he recognized that his refusal to listen to what the machine told him was impossible was irrational, completely irrational.

The day after the patients became the staff the doctor was worried but Strayte was sanguine.

“What are you worried about?” Strayte asked the acting administrator.

“The union, the strike vote. They are still lunatics,” Dr. Heirath murmured. “They have not been getting sane long enough to listen to reason,” the doctor worried out loud.

“That’s precisely it,” the acting assistant administrator responded calmingly. “They will become intoxicated with rationality, they won’t be able to resist reason. It will paralyze them. Don’t worry,” he assured the acting director. “I’ve seen it a million times.” He thought of the students he had seen in his years as an associate professor. Then he remembered Marsha and had second thoughts. “It works most of the time anyway.”

The patients had called a meeting for ten o’clock in the ward. They greeted the acting administrator and the acting assistant administrator with a stony silence as they moved to the nursing station in the front of the ward.

Most of the patients had broken into small groups holding signs that read ‘THE VERMEERS STAFF SAYS: NO PAY NO WORK.’ Leonard Mittleman was busy on the side selling signs to the few groups that still lacked them. The pile of flotsam for which he traded the signs grew by his feet.

“They have been unusually orderly,” Nurse G said as the acting administrator and the acting assistant administrator came near enough to her for her to whisper. “I’m worried.” Dr. Heirath’s face furrowed and he looked at Nick Strayte who was smiling.

A small Japanese man rose from the anonymity of the middle of the room and spoke. “My name is Mata Hirosi,” he said. “I am from Dato, it’s a suburb of Tokyo, via Poughkipsie.” The patients applauded. “I am slightly schizophrenic. I have a split personality.” Loud applause rose from the groups standing behind him. “I am negotiating for the patients.” He stood quietly while from the seat next to him another Japanese rose. “My name is Mata Tsai,” he said, “we are somehow related. I am not from Data but from Smyrna, via MIT. It’s a long story. I will be co-negotiating with Mata. No pay no work” he said and sat down.

The acting administrator rose as soon as the small man settled in his seat. “Dr. Nicholas Strayte who was one of you for a short while before he became one of us, is acting assistant administrator. He will be negotiating for the hospital administration,” and sat down before Strayte could say anything.

Nick Strayte rose slowly. “You are right, absolutely right,” he said to the assembled crowd of patients,” and we of the hospital administration,” he pointed to Nurse G and Dr. Heirath then turned the pointing finger to himself, “couldn’t agree with you more.” Then he sat down. A cheer moved from small group to small group then stopped suddenly when what he said sank in. Then there was silence. Strayte waited a few moments for the silence to sink in then he got up again.

“We are with you 150 percent. The doctor and I have always supported the principle for which you are striking. It is the second principle on which we base our psychiatric work in the hospital. The first principle is, ‘There is never enough money to implement the second principle.’ In this case there is no money at all. The foundation board that runs the hospital has cut off operating funds. There is twenty-eight dollars in the operating account.”

“What about the government’s money?” the accountant who had forged Martin Mash’s signature on the government check yelled out. Strayte looked at him incredulously. “As you know the doctor has put the government reimbursement money in a special account. It will pay this months electric bill and cover the cost of food that has already been ordered. It will keep the hospital open exactly a month. If you have to strike,” he continued, “strike and we will back you 200 percent. We will be with you on the battlements, on the escarpments, in the weight room, in the library, in the recreation room, on the front of the line wherever you are struggling but…but…” He paused to give rationality some crawl room, “the first order of business might be to try to figure out a way of getting some money, enough money to strike for so we could pay you for your work as the staff of this splendid institution.” He sat down again.

Like a wave of cold water, reason surged over the audience and flooded and overwhelmed them.

Both of the small Japanese men rose again and stood crinkled in the middle of the room. The larger of them said, “I move we postpone the strike until we get enough money to strike for.”

“Seconded,” another voice near him cried out.

“All those in favor?” the strike leader asked.

There was an empty silence.

“All those against?” The silence returned.

“Well then it’s unanimous. No strike,” he said.

“Frogs, it’s the fucking frogs fault” May’s voice shot up from the back of the auditorium.

As the idea of a strike disappeared the minuscule bit of order that had organized the patients disappeared with it. It was as if all of the struts that supported a painted backdrop had splinted and failed at once. The patients who weren’t heading for the doors began to jump up and down moaning in a disordered way. Nurse G began to fret that her dream coming back to her. Other patients shuffled around and started to run around in circles.

“Wait a minute,” the smaller of the Japanese pair said getting up on his chair. “Why can’t we earn some money?”

“We can’t earn any money,” May said, “we are crazy as loons.”

The second Japanese man took the floor. “Wait a minute. We are the staff too remember.”

The businessman stopped examining the goods he’d received in exchange for the signs and got up. “We could start businesses,” he said.

The patients stopped rotating and everyone became a little orderly.

Dr. Heirath got up a little confused. “I’m not sure…” he said, looking at Strayte as if the confusion was his fault.

Emily Emily and Emile Emile got up. “We can start businesses,” they said. “The hospital bylaws provide that the patients are permitted to start businesses…”

Dr. Heirath spoke up. “That was to allow the senile patients to sell crafts like hand knitted potty pants and jamies.”

“The bylaws are quite clear,” Emily said after he sat down. “There is no specification of any limit on the business.” Emile Emile stood up next to her. “The definitive judicial statement on the matter established in Grub Vs. Hospital Commission says patients’ businesses may be carried on without let or hindrance so long as no service they are providing conflicts with any other services that are being provided by any other lunatic asylum in the immediate vicinity defined in…”

“Thank you dear,” Emily Emily said cutting her husband off. “They get the idea.”

“What businesses?” Strayte asked. He watched the great speckled bird of rationality take off, circle and make a strafing run. It was a demonstration of flying just for him.

“We could start a boutique,” May said.

“An art gallery,” the small black man shouted.

Things looked like they were getting out of hand. Strayte rose but no one paid any attention to him so he sat down. Dr. Heirath and nurse G glared at him so he got up again.

“How could we start a boutique?” he challenged the patients.

“With all the stuff in the basements,” May explained. “There are oodles and oodles of clothing and other stuff. There’s furniture and shoes and rugs and jewelry and pipes and statues and…It’s wonderful stuff.”

“She’s right,” one of the older patients yelled. “The basements of all of the wings are filled with clothing and all sorts of stuff from the year the hospital began almost. From the ball,” she explained to a bewildered Strayte, “you know every year at tax time…all the junk to the hospital…”

Strayte turned to the doctor. “What are they talking about?”

“I forgot,” Heirath grumbled. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

Strayte tried to regain control of the meeting. “Well that’s a good idea,” he said a little condescendingly, “are…?”

“We could start an art gallery,” the small black man repeated. “We could start the best frigging art gallery in the world.”

“O.K., O.K.,” the Japanese men said together, regaining control of the crowd. “Any other ideas?”

A man in a tall chefs hat rose. “We could open a restaurant, very posh, very four star, very quiet.” He glared at May who was rolling around on the floor. “In the staff dining room. No one eats there now.”

“Wait a minute,” one of the patients yelled out. “We’re staff now. We could eat there instead of the patients dining room.”

“It opens out to the terrace,” the cook continued ignoring the interruption. “Very four star except for the wine. Of course I guess we could make our own or the customers could bring their own. The staff could eat there off hours, perhaps food which did not move.”

“A French restaurant, a French restaurant,” Mr. Chameleon mimicked the accent.

“We could start a used book store,” the librarian spoke up. “There are more books in the basement than there are in the library.”

“We could start a computing school,” Leonard Mittleman said. “Maybe at first a correspondence school then later a commuter computer college.” He looked at John John.

“We could start a call in service for people who are thinking of going crazy,” one of the patients said. “We could give advice, 1-900-going nuts.”

“A restaurant, a boutique, a book store, a correspondence school, an art gallery,” the patients yelled and began pounding on one another’s backs and swinging one another around skipping over those still rolling on the floor. They pounded on the floor and leapt up. Only the business man who went around collecting the signs stood in the corner thinking.

Suddenly Nurse G stood up. “This is completely disorganized,” she said, “completely disordered.” One of the patients grabbed her arm and pulled her into the rolling circle of patients.

“Frogs,” May yelled over the heads of the crowds.

“Lunch,” the man in the chef’s hat screamed “lunch,” and moved to the front of the room and, like the pied piper, led the patients to the door toward the cafeteria.

“We will make money,” someone in the last group of patients to leave shouted.

“A lot of money,” someone added as he pranced out.

“A fortune,” someone else clamored.

“Then we will strike,” the Japanese men said, swinging their circle around Strayte and Heirath and out the door, leaving the acting administrator and the acting assistant administrator suddenly alone in the ward.

“See, rationality,” Strayte said to the doctor as they were left alone in the ward after the last of the patients wheeled out. “No strike.”

“Rationality isn’t worth sucking shit,” Dr. Heirath said as he abandoned Strayte and headed after the patients for lunch.

Chapter 21

There are places steeped in so deep and profound an anarchy that even Murphy’s law does not hold

Vermeers had been laid down in layers by successive waves of craziness coursing over the landscape. Three large wings in different styles jutted off a central block that made up their slightly crooked backbone. Because it was set in the middle of a 15-acre patch of meadow and forest it had no neighbors, otherwise it would have been a blight on any neighborhood.

The lower limb of hospital, the original Vermeers, was a single blunt, three story rectangular building, with a number of basements and sub basements. When the hospital first opened the first floor was occupied by the main ward for rich patients, a small ballroom and a number of offices for the staff.

The staff lived on the second floor which also had a set of private suites for really well to do patients. The front of the second floor had a room in which the hospital board met and auxiliary rooms connected to that purpose. The third floor held the main patients quarters. Part of it was devoted to a small solarium where the patients could sun themselves and a small, dark room from which the sun was kept out, where the violent patients were kept in isolation.

The architect of Vermeers had designed the basement as a maze, partly as a security measure and partly because he admired Daedalus. The original design had called for a library in its center, and recreational rooms and therapy rooms on paths leading to and from it. Only the library was built and the rest of the space and the sub basement left to store material donated to the hospital. The architect of the original building was the first patient in Vermeers.

When the Vermeers had succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, they attached a T shaped structure to the original building so that the whole entity now was shaped like an unbalanced U. The room in which the board carried on the hospital’s business was moved to a suite of rooms on the first floor of the new wing. The ballroom on the first floor of the old building was converted into an auditorium. The solarium was boarded up and used as an auxiliary isolation room.

When the new building was completed, the board ordered the main entrance to the old building closed off. They built a new smaller entrance on the side so that the patients and staff would enter away from the entrance way of the new building. To facilitate any necessary movement between the buildings, they had a system of tunnels built that linked the old Vermeers and the new Vermeers. Then the board built another long driveway to the new building and sealed up the wall between the new building and the old building burying the only door between them in a closet. They did this so that when the board met they would have the distance they needed for the objectivity that dealing with lunatics required.

When the quantity of patients increased and their wandering encroached on the domain of the members of the board who used the new wing as a private club, the governing board of the hospital built a third wing, attaching it to the strut that linked the building but angling it slightly away from the wing which was its neighbor.

The board abandoned its former location to the lunatics, shifted all of its functions to the newly built segment of the complex and built a third driveway so that the board was a bit more distant from the lunatics. No patients quarters were needed in the new wing and none were built. There was a basement and three sub basements built to store donations to the hospital, a vote of confidence in the future of the hospital’s potential as a tax writeoff.

On the left to the front of the second floor was the board room, paneled in mahogany and oak. On the right of the boardroom were a small kitchen and dining room behind which was an elegant bedroom which was for use by the chairman of the board and his secretary when they had to stay and work late into the night to make sure the needs of Vermeers were met. It was available, of course, to any of the other board members and their secretaries when they worked into the night on business that was essential to the well being of Vermeers. In back of these rooms was a new solarium whose use was restricted to board members and residential patients, but only those who were cured and had left Vermeers. Occupying the whole of the first floor of the new building, except for the vestibule and entrance hall, was the ballroom in which the annual Crazy Mans Ball was held. Another long driveway was laid down and the wall between the new building and the old building sealed and a closet built to hold the door that connected them. In the end, the new Vermeers, which was a century old, was really three different buildings with three different entrances. It looked like an arthritic, rhomboid E, that Martin Mash always thought stood for excellence.

“There’s are the tunnels of course,” the acting administrator said.

“What tunnels of course?” Strayte asked.

“Tunnels connecting the buildings. There’s a tunnel system that links one building to another. Very elegant in a way. The board insisted—in case.”

“In case what?”

“Who knows? They never told me. One of the patients got lost once and I discovered it by accident. Heard weird moaning coming from the ground. One of the other patients knew about it. The tunnel in the third wing, the new building comes up in a closet. Near the ballroom,” he added.

“Why a closet?” Nick Strayte asked.

“It’s a lunatic asylum remember. There’s a couple of things I wanted to talk to you about Nick,” the acting administrator said.

“My liver is fine, and I haven’t seen Superman again.”

“Don’t be so self centered. They have to do with this crazy idea of the patients starting businesses. The businessman for one thing.”

“Leonard Mittleman. What about him? He’s doing great. I don’t know what we’d do without him. The patients are going to him whenever they have a business decision to make. He’s giving them great advice as far as I can see. He’s taking a lot of pressure off the both of us.”

“Well that’s the problem,” the acting administrator said. “I don’t think he’s really a businessman at all, and he’s beginning to have his doubts too.”

“So.”

“He came to me the other day, before all this happened, just after breakfast. ‘I know you’re not a psychiatrist,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think I really am a businessman. I think that thinking I was a businessman was part of my delusion.’ I asked him why he thought he wasn’t a businessman. ‘I’m starting to remember the third life I forgot. It’s not nice. I was a shoe salesman.’ Being a shoe salesman isn’t bad, I said. Nick, if he’s recovering some memory he’s pushed down then it means he’s probably getting better. I’m not sure we ought to push him back into his delusion. It’s unethical.”

“Is he sure?” Nick Strayte wanted to know.

“No.”

“Maybe he owned a shoe factory. Are you sure he’s not some really high level executive strung out and cracked up because of stress?”

“No,” Dr. Heirath said, “I’m not. I looked up his record. The police brought him in. No ID, no plastic, nothing. He was muttering about shoes, about buying shoes and selling shoes. He was barefoot. Later at the intake he claimed to be an important businessman, then he claimed to be a clerk who worked in a large trading company.”

Strayte thought about it. “Well if he is a lunatic businessman it would be criminal to allow him to become sane under the delusion he was a shoe salesman. If he is a businessman the experience may help bring him around to sanity. Then he would have been a businessman when he went crazy and a businessman when he went sane. He might not miss the time that he spent being just crazy so much.”

“How about if he’s not?” the acting administrator wanted to know, “what if he’s a shoe salesman.”

“If he’s a crazy shoe salesman who thinks he is a businessman and he really can run these businesses then it would validate his lunacy with reality. When reality and delusion coincided he would be cured no matter which way the change came from. Reality would heal him because he believed he was a businessman and he was. You could discharge him as cured.”

Dr. Heirath shook his head. “It sounds like academic gobbledegook. I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either,” Strayte said. “It’s a specious argument, entirely self interested. But we’re going crazy all of us with this sudden closing. Put off telling him anything and let him continue being crazy as a businessman until this ends one way or the other. A few days more of a delusion can’t hurt. Then you can practice psychiatry. What was the other thing you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Are they really going to start businesses?”

“Why ask me?” Strayte said. “You’re the administrator. You should know. “

“Maybe we should just throw in the towel. Maybe I should just call Mash and tell him I agree and he doesn’t have to worry about trouble. Perhaps he will go along with having the board find places for the really nutty. Maybe the others would be better on the outside. Halfway houses. Maybe it is too protective in here.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No. That’s the problem. I can’t convince myself to lie about it to myself. It’s just too untrue, although I’ve talked myself into believing a lot of stuff that was almost as bad.”

“I have a question for you,” Strayte declared. “Are they really going to open business?”

“I asked you that.”

“I know, I told you yes. Now I’m asking you. You’re the acting administrator.”

“Yes, I guess so. By the way, where are they going to put them?”

“Put what?”

“The businesses they are starting. As acting assistant administrator you were supposed to be supervising them. Where…?”

“The second wing. It’s in very good shape. It’s a natural for a set of stores, the place is laid out more or less like an arcade. The abandoned board room would make a great boutique. Very funky. Next to it is room for a bookstore. It would be perfect. The old staff dining room would make a lovely restaurant. The computer school and the hot line are another problem. There’s an abandoned recreation room in the back. It could be set up for computers. It depends a lot on what they have in mind. Why is there a separate entrance and a driveway separate from the driveway that leads here?”

“Oh. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you tomorrow if we last that long. Go supervise the patients,” the acting administrator said. “See if they are really serious about setting up businesses. Make sure they don’t really go crazy and trash the place.” He waved Strayte out of the door and collapsed in his chair staring at the map on the wall.

Strayte asked Nurse G where the patients were. “It’s an official communication,” he said talking to her back.

“Next door, through the tunnel, center passage,” she said curtly, pointing to the front of the ward where there was a closet. “Are they really going to start businesses?” she asked.

“The acting administrator told me they were so I guess they are,” Strayte said heading to the closet. He followed the signs in the tunnel marked second wing and emerged from between brooms and pails into a discussion the chef and the accountant were having. The businessman stood off to the side and greeted Strayte when he came out of the closet.

“We,” the chef said, pointing to his four assistants standing behind him looking very serious, “are having an argument.”

“They put in an emergency call for us,” Leonard Mittleman whispered to Strayte.

“We are having a disagreement. If a recipe for potato salad for two thousand people calls for 654 pounds of potatoes how many pounds of potatoes do you need for a single serving?”

“Including wastage?”

“Yes,” the chef said.

“Hem,” the accountant said. “It will take a while.” After a minute of thinking he looked up at the chef. “If you were going to make a potato salad for me how many potatoes would you use?”

“One potato.”

“That weighs…?”

“Oh, four ounces.”

The accountant took out his pocket calculator. “You said two thousand people and 654 pounds of potatoes.”

“Yes,” the master chef said.

“A quarter pound,” the accountant said after pushing buttons.

“I told you,” the master chef said. “I told you. Philip here said, what did you say?” the master chef asked.

“.31 pounds.”

“He has a lot to learn about being a master chef,” the accountant said. “Any other questions?”

The master chef moved closer to the accountant as if his question needed privacy to be asked correctly. “Would you consider steak red meat or white meat?” he asked.

“How is it ordered, rare, medium rare, or well done?”

“Rare.”

“In my opinion, only as an eater mind you,” the accountant said, “rare is red meat, definitely red meat. Well done is another matter.”

The master chef smiled. “Exactly. We have some other questions but they will have to wait. Thank you.” He reached into his pocket. “Have a snack? Truffles,” he said.

The small clumps in the chef’s hand looked like peanut clusters.

“No,” he said. “I’m on a diet.”

“That’s O.K.,” the chef said. “They’re really not truffles. Doufou made up to look like peanuts. They taste like truffles though.”

“No, I get fat from looking,” the accountant said. “Any other problems we can help you with just call.”

When he turned to join Strayte and the businessman the accountant whispered. “I think the restaurant business may be in trouble.”

“You never can tell,” the businessman said, “you never can tell.”

“The acting administrator wants me to see how the businesses are shaping up,” Strayte said. “How are they shaping up, Murdoch?”

“Not bad, not bad,” the accountant said. “See for yourself. I haven’t been doing to much,” he said. “Leonard here has done most of the work.”

Strayte slapped Mittleman on the shoulder. “Great. Where’s the boutique?” The businessman pointed down the hall. “Do you mind if I come with you?” he asked Strayte.

“No, not at all.”

“I moved into an office next to the accountant,” Leonard Mittleman said, as they walked. “I arranged for the supplies everyone needed. There was only one glitch,” he confessed. “Racks. The first set I ordered for the boutique. I made a mistake. I used the phone book. Who knew that Unusual Furnishings specialized in erotic stuff. We sent them back, except the two May wanted to keep. The accountant is wonderful,” he continued, “I think he’s really sane. He convinced the bank that he was the new accountant for the hospital. I’m afraid he smudged the line between the hospital administration and the board. When he talked to the bank, he discovered a few open accounts that the lawyer for the board, Mash set up to move money somewhere. He dipped into them to provide enough working capital for me to buy the supplies the businesses needed.”

“In for a pfennig, in for a Mark,” Strayte said.

Over the door of the room designated as the boutique was a big sign that said: Boutique; Clothes for the Wild and Crazy. The room designated as a boutique was large, airy and had a cage in the center that had been used to hold patients who were acting out. Along the back of the cage were the two racks that had been mistakenly ordered from Exotic Furnishing.

“Where did you get the clothing, May?” Strayte asked the woman who had been chosen as the manager of the boutique.

“From the basement. We haven’t even started yet, only a few crates. We picked a year to start with.”

“1954. It was a great fashion year,” she added. “There’s a smattering of clothes from other years. There’s some nice stuff.”

“Where in the basement?” Strayte asked.

“Next to the furniture. We’re selling some chairs and tables also. She pointed to tables and chairs buried under piles of clothing. Leonard says to see what sells then we can adjust our inventory.”

All of the patients who weren’t plagued with images that floated and danced in front of their eyes and distracted them all of the time, had associated themselves with a business and were helping out. The boutique used the most labor, chiefly for sizing dresses and suits.

“We add value you see, right away. Not only is there a size marked on the item but it’s a precise size. Not 14 1/2, but 14 1/2 bony or 14 1/2 fleshy upper arms, and so on. I’ll bet its going to work.”

“Sounds sensible,” Strayte said, “but how…?”

“But there’s more,” the businessman added. “On the label we also say which kind of people who would be attracted to it. ‘Attractive to dark swarthy men, attractive to weak spindly kind of men,’” he read turning over the label of the nearest dress.

“How will you know that?” Strayte asked.

“Does Macy’s tell Gimbels, does Rockwell tell Hughes International, does the Army tell the Navy, does Commerce tell State?”

“O.K.,” Strayte said interrupting him, “I get the idea.”

“O.K., I’ll tell you,” Leonard Mittleman said “but you have to swear not to tell Land’s End.”

“I swear,” Strayte said.

“We graded everyone by size and body features, bony, fleshy around the arms, low armpits, drooping breasts, rhomboid shoulders. Creative Sheldon,” he said

“O.K., the sizing is easy. How about the preference?”

“All of the patients grouped themselves into categories; Middle class white Anglo Saxons, middle eastern sheik types, European nobility, horny romantics, steel Germanics, New York City upper west side types, rural guido types, male chauvinistic pigs.”

“It’s a waste,” Mr. Chameleon yelled out from the corner.

“There are other people that have to work too,” May said to him bruskly.

Mr. Chameleon sulked.

“What about other kinds,” Strayte asked, “that aren’t in the hospital. What categories don’t we have?”

“Oh a lot,” May said.

“Mr. Chameleon is those. He’s the only person in the dark swarthy Latin category. He’s also the tall fair Swedish type.”

“It’s easy,” Mr. Chameleon said. “It’s a matter of concentration.”

Strayte watched him as they were trying to determine the label on a long white flowing dress. He changed into a dark swarthy man parading up and down giving sexy lewd glances to the model. “I don’t like your dress, darling,” he said. “I hate your dress. No, not attractive to dark swarthy types.”

None of the other taste panel of men liked it either. “Well I give up,” May said.

“Wait,” Mr. Chameleon hollered and cycled through his repertoire. “I like it,” he said finally.

“Who is I?”

“A middle aged, couch potato making $36,000 a year driving a Buick, high school education who likes to hunt deer.”

“Throw it out,” May said, “throw it out.”

“You don’t need me here,” Strayte said to May and the businessman who were looking over stock. “Let me see how the art gallery is going.”

The art gallery was going great. The walls had been painted and thirty canvases organized in four grouping were hung on the wall. In the corner the artist was working on another painting. Small cards announced the name of the painting the artist and the price. All of them were priced at 595 dollars, cash and carry.

“I can see you have four artists represented,” Strayte said.

“No,” Willy Smith said.

“Where did the paintings come from?” Strayte asked.

The black man who was wearing a neat suit and a badge marked DEALER explained. “I keep everything he paints in a storage room in the basement. They are all his. Different periods though. Mostly recent. Those are from last month,” he said, pointing to the first groupings. “The next set is from a few months ago. The two are old I guess, ones from half a year ago. The other is ancient. Nine months at least.” They bore no relationship to one another as far as Strayte could see.

“But why did you invent three other painters? Why not just say he painted them all?”

“Well you don’t want people to think he’s frivolous. I kept one from each period. He can copy the style if he has an example. As soon as we sell one I can replace it. There are lots more. He is a genius and all he does is paint,” he said in a voice full of awe and respect.

“Sounds like the beginning of a number of schools,” Strayte said, and turned to go back to the other building and report to the acting administrator.

“Have you talked to the head of the computer correspondence school and the people who are manning the hot line, and the book store personnel?” Leonard Mittleman asked, catching up to Strayte in the corridor as he was heading back to make his report.

“No,” Strayte said.

“They’ll be offended if they think they have no official support. They may not be the businesses we are depending on as bread and butter but they will be quite profitable.”

“How can you make money from phone calls?” Strayte asked.

The business man looked at him in amazement. “From a sociologist too. You still think of the phone as something that carries your voice. That was yesterday. Today it’s a connectivity instrument. It connects your passions, your desires, your money to wherever satisfaction sits. It carries as much of you as the subway—more. Communication is for poor people. Connectivity. It’s a dollar and a half a minute. For a three minute call that costs us 24 cents we make…uh…”

“Four twenty six,” Strayte said.

“Exactly. With twenty lines it adds up.”

“If people call.”

The businessman seemed certain. “People will call. They’re bored. Television is worthless. A lot of people think they are going crazy. We’ve put together an advertisement. ‘Feel you are losing control. Think you’re going crazy. Call 1-900-NUTS and talk about it. 1-900-NUTS. Speak to people who have already been there and know what they are talking about.’

“Are still there,” Strayte commented.

“A detail. There’s a limit to truth in advertising and you’ve just hit it.”

“Where’s the computer programming correspondence school?”

“Down the hall, you can’t miss it.”

Over a doorway Strayte spotted a sign: ‘Vern Meers Correspondence Computer School. Cold Boot Up.’ He knocked and walked in.

The front of the room was filled with computers. There were machines that sat on desks and monstrosities were bigger than a closet. The man he had seen plugged in through earphones to the computer in the artist’s studio came out from behind a machine. He pulled off the earphones he was wearing.

“Are you a student? I’m afraid were not quite ready yet,” he said before he realized it was the acting assistant administrator. “I’m sorry,”he apologized “I’m distracted. If you want to sit down and start you can beta testing the program that we are going to use.”

“I just wanted to see how you are doing. Where did this equipment come from?”

“I don’t know exactly. The businessman got it. A lot of it is really ancient, at least a year old. It’s all working perfectly, though, all except the little PDP11 over there. It’s a bad machine,” he said looking at it peevishly. “I think he got them as donations, so that the company donating them could write off the cost. Vermeers is a charitable institution,” he said. “It is, isn’t it?”

Strayte thought about it. “I guess it is, now that you mention it.”

“How’s the school coming?” Strayte asked.

“Almost ready to roll. There is a bug or two. Want to try it out?”

“I don’t want to disturb you,” Strayte said.

“Oh no problem,” the computer person said. “You have to listen very hard, and to tell the truth, I’m distracted.”

“Do you really want to start a computer programming correspondence school?”

“It’s the least I can do. It’s the least any really crazy person can do. Computers are very important,” he said. “People should know about them. They should know how to make them do things. Do you know why?”

Strayte decided to play the straight man.

“Because they change words into anything. They take words a person writes down—that’s what a program is, words, — and change them into anything, a picture so real it looks like a photograph. Or the words, the program, will control a machine and carve a little sculpture. Screws at first. But a screw is just a little primitive sculpture with a purpose. Or the program, will control an engine or an elevator or a car. You don’t even have to type the words, you can say them and the computer will know what words you’re using.” He dropped his voice as if to keep the communication between the two of them. “And later, you won’t even have to say the words, only think them. Words are for the first time really powerful. College professors like yourself should be jumping up and down with joy. For the first time words have real power. Of course, they’ll take the control out of your hands.” He paused reflectively for a moment. “The reverse is true too of course, there’s no free lunch.”

Strayte made a face.

“Oh, I mean, you know, they can transmit a picture into a collection of words, and a piece of music into paragraphs and paragraphs. It’s all the same stuff to it. Now if we gave it ears or eyes so that it could see the difference inside, in its very being, that would make all the difference. That’s all it would take, eyes and ears then they would hear the differences. But, maybe that’s in the future. For now only the magic of making words—that’s all a computer programming language is—into anything. That’s not all of course. I really looked forward the strike. No money no strike. It’s not only the money. The school is a really good idea. I had a lot of really interesting ideas for the school. Do you want to hear them?”

“Yes I do,” Strayte said, fascinated. “I’m really interested.”

“Well I had it all worked out. The program got written,” the computer person explained. “It’s really very simple most of it. Each student got a disk that presented them with a series of lectures, a series of exercises, and a final test. When they completed the final exam, they sent the disk back.”

Strayte did not like the past tense which intimated there was another present tense that was very close to the future. “And you correct it and send it back to them?” he asked.

The computer programmer looked at him strangely. “Why would I want to do that. No they send it back for show. The businessman suggested it. He thinks it would add a human touch. Their work has already been corrected, In fact the program has rewritten itself to adjust to the mistakes they’ve made doing the exercises and their exam. They could keep it and tell the machine they wanted to check their exam and go on. The disk had all of the years work on it. I was thinking putting a self correcting, self compiling compiler on the disk that would actually make the errors correct and run any program they wrote because the errors wouldn’t be errors anymore because the language would have been modified to make it right. I mean if you can correct a mistake by changing the language why make a person conform to some fixed standard that will change anyway later on?”

“It was too much work?” Strayte inquired.

“No it’s just that they are going to have to work in the sane world and they might as well learn the hard way. I tried it, I know.”

“Well I like the idea anyway,” Strayte said.

The computer person appreciated the compliment.

“So what did the program do beside present them with exercises, correct their work and give them a final exam?”

“Well it showed them their mistakes and coached them for the right one.”

“How did it do that?”

“It fed the keyboard a 450-volt shock. They would have only made each mistake once. It’s a hell of a jolt,” the computer programmer said. “Want to try?”

“No,” said Strayte. “I’m not sure that’s an effective mode of teaching.”

“I was afraid of that,” he said. “Neither did Leonard. It was my first choice. I’ve worked out another system though. This is the one I think we’re going to go with. We still send them a disk that they have to send back with the exam. That much we keep. For the correspondence school the 450 volts is out.”

“How does it work?” Strayte asked.

“The program coaches them subliminally. It presents an image to them of the correct answer but below the threshold of perception. It flashes off and on much faster than they can perceive it.”

“So.”

“So they are constantly getting a hint of the right answer. Not the right answer exactly but a hint as to the right direction. Then it waits for them to type in a piece of code. If they get it wrong the incorrect parts are erased, the correct parts left and they are given this subliminal message again, a little slower. They learn. Guaranteed.”

“How does the program…?”

“Don’t worry about details. It knows, it’s a very smart program.”

“How long did it take you to write it?”

“Well,” he hesitated.”Its not quite that simple,” he said. “The computer wrote it.”

“What do you mean?” Strayte asked abandoning any attempt to get at the mechanics of the production of the program.

“The disk we send,…the program. It’s not really a program for teaching. It gets into the student’s computer It talks to it directly it tells it what it wants. I mean my computer tells their computer.”

Strayte shrugged. “I don’t think I’ve heard of that kind of programming.”

“It’s the only programming I know how to do, really,” the programmer said.

“Will it work?”

“I’m sure it will,” the computer programmer said.

“Would you like to listen?”

Strayte put on the earphones again. Only a dull hiss came from the computer.

“Get it.”

“No.”

“Would you like to try the program?”

“Does it still have bugs?”

“One or two. I’m working it on now.”

“Well I’ll try it after you work out the bugs.”

“Sure enough,” the computer person said. “By tomorrow, guaranteed. Is there someone whose going to help me, address envelops and that sort of thing? I’m not good at that.”

“I’m sure Leonard can work something out. Don’t concern yourself,” Strayte said.

Strayte headed for the closet again.

“Did you see the computer programming correspondence school?” the businessman asked.

“Yes, very nice, if the bugs get worked out. Where did you get the equipment?”

“Oh,” the businessman said, “donations. Did you drop in on the hot line?”

“No,” Strayte said, “I thought I might put it off until later.”

“They’ll really be disappointed. They’ll see it as loss of confidence. Just poke your head in.” Strayte let himself be led back through the corridor again to a room marked ‘SO YOUR THINKING OF GOING INSANE HOT LINE.’

“An interesting name,” he said.

He opened the door without going in and waved to the people sitting in front of a bank of telephones.

“Where did you get the telephones?” he whispered to the businessman.

“Same place as I got the computers,” the businessman replied.

Frank Hymut was in charge of the telephone hot line. “Did you come to see if I was having my fit?”

“No,” Strayte said, “we came to see how the hot line was working.”

“Come in,” he said, “we’re making dry runs, practicing what the people manning the phones should say to people who call up. We could use your expertise.”

“Bill,” he said to someone who was balancing a phone on his ear, “suppose you got a call from someone who was considering suicide, what would you say?”

“I don’t know anything about suicide,” Bill replied, “it’s against my religion. I’d give it to Betsy. She’s has a lot of experience with suicide.”

“O.K., Betsy what would you say to a man calling saying he were considering suicide.”

“I’d say he should check his insurance, I mean did it pay if he committed suicide.”

“Suppose it did?” Harry asked.

“Well then I’d ask him if he talked it over with his parents.”

“Suppose his parents were dead?” Harry probed.

“I’d ask him if he talked it over with God and I’d let God talk to him a while.” She held the phone at arms length.

“Suppose that didn’t work.”

“I’d tell him to cling to the pain, to hold it close, because pain can be a real companion.”

“Suppose he wasn’t in pain?” Harry asked, giving Betsy his best shot.

“Well then I’d tell him he’s a fucking crazy fool because if why would a person commit suicide unless he were in constant, excruciating pain.”

“We’ll work on it some more,” Harry told Strayte. “It’s getting there.”

“Can I go back now,” Strayte asked the businessman.

“Did you visit the bookstore?”

Strayte sighed. “Where is it?”

“It’s closed now. Ella is in the library selecting books for her clean books section. But you should come back later and see her. She likes you.”

“I like her,” Strayte said, “she’s a good librarian. Can I go back and report to the acting administrator now?”

“Sure,” Leonard Mittleman said, and walked with him back to the closet.

Dr. Heirath was sitting with his feet on his desk when Strayte came in. “Well, what do you think?” he asked.

“How long did it take for Rome to belly up?” Strayte asked.

Five hundred years or so for it really to fall apart,” Heirath said making up a number.

“I think we can collapse the process into, I’d say twenty-four hours.”

“That bad.”

“No, for a lunatic asylum it’s great. How long would they let you keep the place open if everything went kapooee tomorrow?”

“A week.”

“I think your pre-suicide is really over,” Strayte said.

Chapter 22

People seldom survive the bite of the butterfly. But the scars of the bite of the butterfly are beautiful

Everything stopped in Monrow for the annual Crazy Man’s Ball. This was not its formal name which was The Vermeers Annual Cotillion. But everyone who spoke about it called it the Crazy Man’s Ball even though no crazy man had ever been invited, not even once.

Everything stopped in the city not only because the cotillion was the social event of the year, but because it was the occasion on which the wealthy people of the community reckoned their income tax. Seven days of frenzied charitable giving were followed by a week of frenzied tax writeoffs after which everyone celebrated their savings and the government’s loss with a night of dancing and singing.

It was one of those Camelot times in America, one of those times when cracked and rent furniture became antiques, when broken pots and pans became heirlooms, when torn dresses became couture street apparel, stains became decorations, patches ornaments. It was one of those halcyon times when pictures of dead, forgotten relatives became works of an unknown master of early modern photography, when broken toys and emptied bottles became collectibles. It was a golden age when dining room tables missing legs became able to stand on their own as modern art, and kitchen chairs without seats held their own as avant guard furniture. It was time of mysteries when the bonds of defunct corporations regained their value and costume jewels miraculously became diamonds through the act of charity. These modern miracles accumulated in the offices of accountants, in the back rooms of appraisers, out of sight, without much attention being paid to them. They happened, they were commonplace because it was the time of the Crazy Man’s Ball.

Everyone who was anyone gave something to Vermeers no matter how small. And no matter how small the donation, their spirit of charity was rewarded with a certificate stating that their gift was of extraordinary value to the lunatics in the hospital. The lowest estimate that the hospital allowed for any donation was always twice the value of the equivalent of a new, imported comparable item.

The Crazy Man’s Ball was the occasion for cleaning house for dumping a family’s yearly accumulation. When a family moved, the old furnishing went to the hospital. When a house was redecorated, the old furniture found its way to the hospital. A child’s development over a year was marked by the donation of the clothing she outgrew to the hospital. The quickening of a step was celebrated by the donation of braces, the improvement of vision by the donation of glasses.

Death and bereavement were similarly marked. When Martin Mash’s father died intestate, suddenly and unexpectedly, Martin and his mother discovered his infidelity. He was not just now and then, impulsively unfaithful. That, they could have understood, and as members of the aristocracy of the community, forgiven.

No, he had led a double existence, he had carried off an entirely different life separate from them, complete with another home and a mistress and who knows what. What was worse, from every sign they could find, he was happy, very, very happy in this second life, much happier than he was with them.

When they discovered his indiscretions, they threw his mistress out of the house he paid for and gave its belongings complete and unexamined to Vermeers. Not selling them was the ultimate insult they could think of. That year at income tax time the government rewarded their generosity by giving them money.

When a lawyer retired his library went to the hospital. When a doctor died the instruments that could not be sold were donated. Over the years people had given one of almost everything to the hospital and the basements and sub basements of the hospital accumulated an enormous amount of goods.

The Crazy Man’s Ball was the way the original hospital board provided an opportunity for an uplifting spiritual experience, remembered the obligation of the wealthy to those less fortunate than they were, and adjusted the community’s status ladder. The Crazy Man’s Ball celebrated the difference between being in and being out. It was the occasion on which one’s worth could be quietly broadcast far and wide, when a judicious donation to the hospital could move you up a rung on the status ladder and an insufficiently large donation would slide you to the bottom.

When the hospital was first built, only the wealthy contributed, for it was for lunatics from wealthy families that it was constructed. Initially you could donate money or something in goods but the well to do only gave money. A little later, when the hospital had been democratized slightly, donations of goods were left to the middle class who were trying to impress their crowd and to those higher status families on the way down. The ball was like a hock shop in which the pledge was for status rather than survival. What was donated was never sold, merely stored in the second basement of the hospital.

People who had real money seldom trafficked in goods although occasionally a respectable merchant dumped a mistaken speculation on the hospital and made a wild claim for recognition. It was seldom honored. Attendance at the Crazy Man’s Ball was by invitation only.

Right after second world war, when the board that governed Vermeers snubbed the people who had taken the war seriously and profited from it, there was a minor revolution and the new rich threw out the old rich and rearranged the status ladder. Those who had let their money rest in paper and banks were displaced by those who had patriotically used the war to enrich themselves. Sensitized by the horrible conflict to opportunities to make money, the new board realized that while they could not steal from the hospital, its charitable purposes were an ideal shelter under which one could take refuge from any number of storms. After a while a second wing of the hospital was built to hold the generosity of the well to do of the community.

It was at this time that all of the wealthy people in the community, not only the stumbling and sliding rich, stopped giving money and started giving tax deductions. The opportunity to give money was transferred to the middle and working class who carried over an urge to participate from the war.

Collections of money were made in the schools and factories. But a money donation unless it was very large was never enough to get one invited to the ball and even then only if you were white and were a golfing associate or the business partner of someone who meant something in the community. Donations by the merely wealthy were acknowledged, but only large contributions left in wills, were honored by a posthumous invitation to the Crazy Man’s Ball.

Nothing was ever done with the goods donated to the hospital. They were tagged and crated and deposited in the basement and sub basements of the hospital.

Because the Crazy Mans Ball disrupted the normal routines at Vermeers special efforts were made—after a lawsuit by a troublemaker at the college—to guarantee the patients’ welfare. The bylaws of the hospital were rewritten to state that the hospital administrator had to suspend any special and unusual medical procedures during the week of the ball so that social events could never endanger the well being of the patients. The chief medical officer, the psychiatric director and the administrator all had to give their permission for the event to be held. They had to swear that the cotillion would not hurt the mental health of the patients more than it would socially and economically benefit the hospital. If the Crazy Man’s Ball endangered the psychiatric purposes of the hospital, permission to hold it could be denied. No administrator, no chief psychiatrist, no chief medical officer had ever done so. Ever.

When the perfunctory permission forms authorizing the ball came to his desk the acting administrator refused to sign them. Martin Mash overlooked the oversight for a day then called him.

“The ball,” he said, “sign the papers.”

“What about money for the operating account? It’s down to twenty one dollars. I need money to run the hospital,” Heirath screamed.

“The board is working on it. Sign the papers.”

“We’re running out of money.”

“Sign the papers.”

“I want to invite a few people.”

“You’re crazy. Sign the papers.”

“A few people, not many.”

“Sign the papers.”

“They need the recognition.”

“No.”

“A few.”

“No. Sign the papers.”

“O. K.” Dr. Heirath signed the papers.

It was clear there was little he could do. He had asked for permission to invite a few people who he though would enjoy the entertainment and the spectacle. Permission had been denied him. If he withheld his signature, they would just forge the signature of the administrator who was in Belutchistan and that would be that. He put the papers in an envelope and tossed the letter in the mail and went out to look for Nick Strayte to invite him to the ball. He also posted a sign in the ward that any patient who wanted to go to the Crazy Man’s Ball could go—if they weren’t on duty and if they could find suitable attire; Sneakers and pajamas were not allowed.

“Nick,” Dr. Heirath said when he found him. “You are invited to the Crazy Man’s Ball. All of the patients are invited too.”

“By whom?”

“By me speaking for the board.”

In all of the years he had taught at the college the Crazy Man’s Ball was an occasion for parodies by the college newspaper. It was the article on the Crazy Man’s Ball that lead to indirectly the publication of the picture that Dean Grundle said was pornographic and led to the calling of the meeting in which Strayte took of his clothing to make his point. A few of the very old professors who came from established families in the communities went and they brought back tales of finery and glory which no one took seriously except a secretary or two who were considering propositions by sons of the members of elite families who promised them an invitation in exchange for a quick fuck in the office after working hours.

“Dancing is not my forte,” Strayte said. “Anyway who would I bring, Nurse G. “

“Nurse G is mine,” the doctor said menacingly.

“Well then.”

“Oh, come on,” the doctor said, “who would you have brought if you had gotten an invitation to the Crazy Man’s Ball when you were at the college.”

“I wouldn’t have gotten an invitation.”

“Well if you did get an invitation and you went.”

He thought of his ex wife, of Marsha, of the associate professor of drama with whom he had had an affair. “I wouldn’t have gone.” Then he thought of Helen O’Rourke the female cop that arrested him. He wondered if she could dance and if she would have to wear her shoulder holster. “Are you really going to bring Nurse G?” he asked.

“It was only an idea,” the doctor said. “Did you know she’s moved into the staff quarters or the former staff quarters with her cats? She says she’s been spending nights there most of the time anyway. She has bad dreams. I hear her at night. They must be wicked dreams she’s having. No, probably not. I’ll spend my time watching the patients.”

“Which patients?”

“The patients who are on duty that night as staff.”

“I thought you said the patients were invited.”

“Anyone who isn’t on duty is invited.”

“By whom.”

“By the board, through me,” Dr. Heirath said. “It should finally be a Crazy Man’s Ball.”

“Are they going?”

“Who, the board? Most of them.”

“The patients who are not on duty as staff,” Strayte said.

“Of course.”

“Well then the people on duty won’t have anyone to watch so they can go and you won’t have anyone to watch so you can go.”

“I’ll think about it. But who would I go with?”

Strayte refused to restart the conversation, “Go with a frog, who cares,” he said. “I’ve got work to do.”

May had decided that the patients attending the ball should have a theme decade. The last really complete collection of clothing, to which almost nothing was added by recent donations were the Eisenhower years. She decided that they would go in gowns and tuxedos of the fifties.

She selected the outfits then she modified them, a decoration here, an accessory there. She was very good. When she was done they were like remodeled battleships, the only things you could recognize of the original were the guns and the spirit. When the patients saw the invitation to the ball everyone who was conscious and aware visited the Boutique and picked an outfit.

“Don’t tell them about our boutique,” Leonard Mittleman instructed everyone. “Tell them there is a boutique, but don’t tell them anything else. Keep it a secret.”

Everyone swore they would.

“Were not ready to open yet. It will get them talking and asking their friends. When we do open everyone will know about it in an hour from the first customer and everyone will think it is their secret.”

The patients were milling around, excited and enthusiastic when the acting assistant administrator showed up with a lady with a gun.

The idea of going to the Crazy Man’s Ball had grown on Nick Strayte. The ball didn’t interest him at all but the idea of seeing the lady cop appealed to him. When he called to ask her to the ball she recognized his voice.

“How are you Nick?” she asked.

“Not bad, and yourself?”

“O.K. I’ve requested a transfer and they’re working on it.”

“To what?”

“Out of the patrol car and undercover. I’m not sure. Community relations maybe. Following up noise complaints, lost dogs that sort of stuff.”

“You want it?” Strayte asked detecting a note of unhappiness.

“No, not really, but I need it. I can’t ride with Billy any more.”

“You didn’t press charges.”

“No, and now its out of the question. The thing is, he doesn’t see the littlest thing wrong with what he did. Whenever he asks me when we are going to do it again I want to shoot him. The urge is becoming irresistible.”

Strayte changed the subject. “How would you like to go to the Crazy Man’s Ball? It’s a…”

“I know what it is. How did you get invited?”

“Brains and personality,” Strayte said. “Would you like to go? I know it’s late to ask.”

“I don’t have anything to wear to something like that,” she sad sadly.

“Not to worry. They’ll be able to find you something elegant here. Can you come to the hospital a couple of hours before eight?”

“You’re sure?”

“About what, the dress.”

“That you want to invite me.”

“I couldn’t think of anyone else I would think of taking.” It was true.

When she got to the hospital the acting assistant administrator took her to the boutique. “Can you find me something with a jacket?” Helen asked. “It can be a short jacket,” she said. May found her a lovely off-white gown with a petite sequined jacket.

“It’s beautiful.”

All of the patients were standing around. “It fits wonderfully,” someone said.

“Very creative. The bulge under your armpit looks like an extra tit,” Mr. Cricket crackled.

“It only needs an accessory,” May said. “How about this?” She reached in her smock. “I’ve been saving this for someone. I think you’re it.” It was a broach in the shape of a butterfly.

“It’s lovely,”Strayte said although he thought it might be too colorful for the dress. It wasn’t.

Helen started to cry as she looked in the mirror. “I’m damaged goods,” she said.

“We are all damaged goods,” Strayte said. “You’re less damaged than most. If you don’t stop crying I will ask Superman to come and dry your tears,” he said, as he reached out and wiped them away.

“O. K.,” she said. “How do we get to the ball?”

“Follow me,” May said, to everyone who was waiting around. She had changed and looked like the good witch of the West.

When they exited the closet, Dr. Heirath stared at Strayte and Helen. “A very handsome pair. Well the Crazy Man’s Ball welcomes you and I welcome you.”

Nurse G had pulled herself together and looked very pretty. She wore the uniform of a full colonel in the Army Nurses Corps. “I can wear it to formal occasions. If I talk to you now,” she said to Strayte, “it’s only because of her. “You look beautiful,” she complimented Helen.

“Thank you, you look pretty swell yourself.”

“I do, don’t I,” Nurse G said, grabbing Dr. Heirath’s arm, “but I’m worried the ball will be nothing but disorder.”

“Not from our crew,” Strayte said. “Do you want…?”

“No, you two go in and have a ball,” Heirath said, chuckling. “Nurse G and I will watch our group,” he said as another threesome emerged from the closet.

“I can only do one dance,” Nick Strayte said to Helen O’Rourke as they entered the ballroom, “the foxtrot. But I can do it to anything.”

“Beats me,” Helen O’Rourke said. “I can’t dance at all but I’m a quick learner,” she said as they floated out to the dance floor.

They danced the fox trot to the rhumba, the tango and the waltz.

“Not bad,” Nick Strayte said. “Not very bad at all. You’re sure you can’t dance?”

“No, not a step.”

“I’m tired,” she said, “could we get some air.”

They headed for the door that led to the meadow through which Strayte had pushed Mr. Cricket to the lab.

“The air is wonderful. It’s beautiful,” Helen said, resting her head on Strayte’s shoulder. In the darkness, points of light leapt around. They glowed like fireflies but leaped around like crickets.

~~

Martin Mash put the last detail in place for the Crazy Man’s Ball an hour before the event was scheduled. He had absolutely lost touch with the artist’s girl friend which could only mean one thing. The artist had killed her and committed suicide. It was an unlikely fiction, he acknowledged, but there was no more likely fiction that was as convenient for what he had in mind. He was going to make an announcement at the ball. He called the owner of the gallery in town who sold the paintings for him. “Double the price of the paintings tomorrow and expect a real stampede,” he told the sleepy gallery owner.

He had an idea how to dump the last of the paintings he held before the hospital was closed and he might be forced to take a vacation from moonlighting as an art wholesaler. An award was given each year at the Crazy Mans Ball to the person who had done the most in the previous tax year to advance the work of Vermeers. The award this year would include not only the customary plaque but a work of art, the one painting that the hospital still owned of the artist whose paintings he was manipulating. If he gave the hospitals painting to Triff, the other members of the community’s elite would want one and he could dump the lot he held at unreasonably high prices. It would be his surprise.

Everything was ready.

The patients had come out of the tunnel into the closet in threes like prisoners escaping from a stalag. They drifted into the ballroom quietly. Dr. Heirath watched them come. They were an elegant group. When the patients hit the dance floor all Dr. Heirath’s anxieties went away. They mingled perfectly.

May was an instant hit.

“I love that dress,” the banker’s wife said to her. “It’s very familiar. I can’t quite place it.”

“Maybe you saw it in a magazine, my dear,” May said.

“Was it in a magazine?” the woman asked.

“I’m not sure,” May said. “Probably. I bought it in a very elegant boutique.”

“Which?”

“I can’t say. It was a private showing they’re not open yet. They made me promise not to say anything,” May whispered. “They will open in a week or so. Of course by then probably all of the good stuff will probably be taken by the managers friends. “

“Oh,” said the woman.

“Well,” May said. “If you can keep a secret, I guess I could tell one person.”

Mrs. Banker swore she would not tell a soul.

“The address is 355 Ver Meer’s Lane number 2.”

“It sounds very familiar.”

“Its close by,” May said. She pointed to Eustice who had worn two dresses in layers to the ball. “She got her dresses there too.”

“I think she’s over dressed,” the woman said.

“Well,” May said, “she has another affair after this one and she didn’t want to wear the same thing. You understand.”

The woman shrugged.

May watched Mrs. Banker skip off and bury herself with a friend to share the secret.

The highlight of the ball was a double treat. First there was the dancing contest which was won by Emile and Emily. The second feature was the presentation of the award to the person who had done the most for the hospital in the last year. The fight between Peter Triff and his accountant and Peter Triff’s wife and his mistress was an unscheduled event.

~~

When Peter Triff was sure he was going to receive the award as the person who had contributed most to Vermeers he prepared for the event with more than his usual thoroughness. First, he took his beeper in to be checked out. Then he went about the business of trying to organize the event for the two women in his life who would be attending. Despite his elaborate scheming to avoid it, both his wife and his mistress were coming to the Crazy Man’s Ball.

To prevent either of them from even accidentally bumping into the other on a shopping spree, he decided he would buy them each a dress for the ball. He was fairly sure that his wife did not know about his mistress and he was certain that they were not personally acquainted, but the plot of some film flitted in his unconscious and encouraged him to be thorough and not take any chances.

At the shop when Peter Triff bought the dresses he was very very careful. He had written their measurements and addresses on two separate cards.

“How many of this kind of dress do you have in stock?” he asked when he picked out the dress for his wife.

“Only one,” the woman who owned the shop, said.

“And this one?” he asked when he selected the dress he picked out for his mistress.

“Only one.”

“Do you only have only one of all of the dresses here?”

“Oh, no,” she said, opening a door to the storage area. “We have millions of the others,” and she showed him racks of duplicates of most of the other dresses.

“Safe,” Peter thought, although safe from what he was not as sure of as he was about getting the annual award as the person who had done the most for the hospital.

“Why should you get it again?” Triff asked Mash when he dropped in to inform the lawyer that the plans for getting the hospital transformed into the mother franchise were advancing. “You got it last year.”

“And the year before,” Mash said

“Why should you get it?” he asked the young psychiatrist when Triff broached the idea that he should receive the award.

“Because, in fact, I made the most important contribution to the hospital in fifty years. I closed it.”

“You have a point,” Mash said. Peter Triff was named Vermeer’s Man of the year.

A week before the ball Peter Triff had second thoughts about the award. “Maybe you’d better award it to yourself again,” he said.

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“The plaque’s already been engraved. Besides, I have a surprise for you. A pleasant surprise,” he added when the young psychiatrist expressed his doubt. “No, I want it to be really a surprise,” Mash insisted, when Triff demanded to know what the surprise was.

The young psychiatrist hated surprises.

“O.K.,” the young psychiatrist said, but he had his doubts. Those doubts blossomed and flourished up to the night of the ball when he dressed at CTTL so that he could meet his wife at Vermeers for the cotillion. He had worked out an elaborate plan for the evening.

“I won’t be able to make it home on the night of the ball,” he told his wife. “I’ll meet you there 8 P.M. sharp,”

“Peter,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I have a surprise for you.”

“What?” the young psychiatrist asked.

“No, I won’t tell you now. I’ll surprise you.”

He told his mistress the same thing more or less when he called her. She was furious that he had not been able to talk his wife out of coming to the ball. “Not my fault,” he said, “someone on the board told her I was getting an award. Don’t worry about it. You’ll look spectacular in the dress. I’ll meet you after I get rid of her. She’ll only stay until the award. After then it’s our night out. Flirt a little with the board. There will be some doctors from CTTL. You can flirt with them too. Let them eat their hearts out.”

“Oh, Peter,” she said.

“What?”

“Never mind,” she said, “it will be a surprise,” and hung up.

When his wife arrived he was surprised to find she was not wearing the dress he had picked out for her.

“What was wrong with it?”

“Nothing darling it fit me to a tee. It was perfect. Only, I wanted something with a bit more sparkle.” She had picked out one of the dresses that he rejected because there were a lot of them and other people could have bought one and made trouble.

When they walked into the ballroom handing their invitation to the doddering old man wearing a badge saying HEAD OF SECURITY, the first thing Mrs. Peter Triff noticed was that another woman was wearing the same dress that she was wearing. “Look at that Peter. Why did you buy a common dress?”

“That wasn’t the dress I picked,” he reminded her, “You selected it.”

“But it was your gift,” she said and pouted.

His mistress said the same thing after he had excused himself from his wife and made his way toward the men’s room where she waited for him.

“I was going to surprise you but…”

“But what?”

“You surprised me. Why did you buy your wife the same dress?”

“That’s not the dress I bought you.”

“I know his,” mistress said, “but I think it of your gift even if I picked it out. It was in poor taste,” she said and stomped off to flirt a little more.

Peter Triff went into the men’s room and put cold water on his face and started back to the ballroom. Half way across the dance floor he bumped into the patient whom he had interrogated as a wife and child killer. A flicker of partial recognition crossed the young psychiatrist’s face.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“Probably not,” Murdoch answered. “You may have seen me at a convention of accountants if you’re an accountant. Are you?”

“No, I’m a doctor. A psychiatrist.”

“Very interesting,” he said. “Have you used t94.s ?”

“What the hell is t94.s?”

“Oh, it’s a tax shelter. Very profitable. Most accountants only tell their very special clients about it. It shelters almost all of the money a young professional like yourself, a successful psychiatrist is likely to make in a year. For you, I guess you could shove 94% of you income there and the IRS would lose sight of it entirely. Very safe, very hush hush.”

“My accountant never mentioned it,” Peter Triff said angrily.

“Well I’d think about changing accountants,” the little man said rubbing his nose as he drifted off.

Peter Triff went out looking for his accountant. He found him flirting with his mistress.

“What about t94.s?” the young psychiatrist shrieked at his accountant.

“What the hell is a t94,” the accountant asked. He was a little drunk. “Nope, don’t have a clue what you are talking about.”

“You lying bastard,” the psychiatrist shouted. “94% is what it is. Was he bothering you?” he asked his mistress.

“No, he was telling me about tax shelters,” she said innocently.

Peter Triff punched his accountant in the nose.

When his wife saw Peter standing over the accountant with blood on his mind she finished the dance she was having with Martin Mash and moved over to him. Only when she was standing beside him did she see the woman who was wearing the same dress as she was.

“Can’t you tell who you’re married to,” she yelled at Peter. “Who do you think you are?” she shrieked at the woman who was wearing her dress. “What gives you the right to wear my dress, and spoil my evening?”

“Up yours,” Peter’s mistress said to Peter’s wife, who responded with a right to the chin.

The two flailing women trampled on the accountant who was beginning to revive. He got up and went at Peter who was trying to separate the women, each of whom was calling to him for help. “Help me get this bitch off of me Peter,” his mistress cried.

“Peter, kick the wimpy slut,” his wife called. The flailing foursome tumbled to the ground, struggling.

That was after the dance contest which Emile and Emily won hands down with a beautiful tango, punctuating the breaks with an argument about a recent Supreme Court case.

“Do you know them?” the banker asked his wife.

“I think he owns a new boutique.”

“They’re new in town. Lawyers, I think,” someone else near them chimed in.

“Why should they win?” someone asked.

“They were the best dancers,” the banker said matter of factly.

“What difference does that make? The award always goes to Mr. Walker and his wife.”

“But they are in Florida this year.”

“I know, but it’s not traditional.”

The band stopped playing dance music and provided a drum roll for the oldest member of the board who rolled his wheel chair up to the podium.

“We’re about to present the award to the person who made the most valuable contribution to the hospital this year,” he croaked. “As usual William Mash will present the award. Unfortunately Willie couldn’t make it tonight due to his untimely death eleven years ago. In his absence however his son Martin will do the honors. “

Just as Martin Mash was getting ready to go up to the podium to present the award he spotted Dr. Heirath with Nurse G on his arm. The last of the patients had come through the tunnel and they wanted to see the festivities up close.

“Just to make sure they’re orderly,” Nurse G said.

“What are you doing here?” the attorney for the board screamed at the liver doctor.

“I’m watching.”

“Watching.”

“Watching what,” the attorney screamed.

“People dancing,” the acting administrator said.

“No one invited you. Out, out.” He yelled for security. Two big men came skipping behind the shuffling guard wearing a badge which said CHIEF OF SECURITY.

“Throw the man out,” the attorney screamed.

“Who should I throw out?” the chief of security wanted to know.

“The head of the hospital,” Martin Mash yelled. “The head of the hospital.”

The security person was confused and shuffled anxiously. The man who was yelling was the head of the hospital. Working in a madhouse was taxing. The doctor was acting administrator, acting chief medical officer and acting chief psychiatrist but no one had ever called him the head of the hospital. There was only one man who was the head of the hospital. “Take him away,” the chief of security said, pointing to Martin Mash.

The two very large men grabbed Martin Mash and lifted him up and carried him outside. “Not me, him.”

“Who,” the head of security wanted to know.

“The head of the hospital.”

“Take him away,” the security chief said angrily.

“A temporary delusion. Overwork. Probably something’s up with his liver,” Dr. Heirath commented as Martin Mash was taken away.

On the podium the man in the wheelchair read from a sheet in front of him. “And now to present this year’s award I am very proud to present the head of the hospital, Martin Mash.”

Except for Peter and his accountant and Peter’s wife and mistress who were rolling around pummeling one another, everyone else stopped dancing and strained to see who was going to be Vermeers’ Man of the Year.

Dr. Heirath saw Mr. Chameleon in a tuxedo walking up to the podium looking exactly like Mash.

Mr. Chameleon cleared his throat. “It’s a great honor for me to present this award for the most important contribution to Vermeers this year to,” he peered over the shoulder of the man in the wheelchair, “the young psychiatrist Peter Triff.”

Everyone, including Mr.Chameleon turned to look at Peter struggling with the accountant.

“I see Dr. Triff is occupied.” Shifting a little on the podium, Mr. Chameleon improvised and became Peter Triff.

“On behalf of myself and those near and dear to me especially the patients of the hospital, the crazy people, in whose name this award is given, I accept this honor. One of the things I did this year was to make their lives more interesting, a lot more interesting. As for the future who knows. For the lunatics who I have helped and those who have helped me, Dr. Heirath, the acting administrator and acting chief medical officer and acting chief psychiatrist and Dr. Nick Strayte, a Sociologist I believe, I accept this award.”

Peter Triff’s wife squealed as Peter Triff’s mistress clobbered her as they both saw Peter Triff on the stage. “Who are you?” they screamed at the man rolling around on his accountant.

The audience was stunned. In all of the years that the Crazy Mans Ball had been held no one, no matter what the circumstances had mentioned crazy people. It was unnecessary, unseemly, and offensive.

To crown off his performance Mr. Chameleon made a beeper go off inside the pocket of his tuxedo. All of the patients roared and applauded.

The members of the board and the invited guests hooted at the character on the stage whom they took to be Peter Triff.

“Where’s Mash?” they shouted. “Where is the bounder? How dare he give an award to someone as crass as to mention crazy people. Where’s Mash?” the cry went up.

Nurse G stood on her tippy toes and called for order. All of the patients who recognized her quieted down. “It’s time to go home now,” Dr. Heirath shouted, and headed for the closet followed by the most elegant guests just as Martin Mash reentered the ballroom.

“You clod,” the guests as they caught sight of him. “What the hell do you mean giving the award to someone who talks about crazy people?”

“It was all a mistake,” Mash shouted, not quite knowing what they were shouting about. As he walked up to the podium he noticed someone working on the painting he was going to give Peter Triff with his plaque as hospital’s man of the year. He stood speechless for a moment. It was the artist who had painted it, touching up some of the features of an abstract mountain with icing from the cake and brandy.

“It certainly is a mistake,” all of the members of the board mumbled loudly. “A really outrageous mistake. How can we have fun when someone rubs crazy people in our faces.”

“I’m going home,” the oldest member of the board yelled and headed for the exit. “Me too,” all of the other members of the board except Haddy Washington yelled and headed for the exits.

“The women’s auxiliary is leaving,” the head of the women’s auxiliary announced and the women’s auxiliary tramped for the exit.

“If the women are going we are going too,” announced the head of the male auxiliary.

“Well there’s no sense sticking around when all of the important people are leaving,” Peter Triff’s accountant called out from the floor and he pushed Peter Triff away and got up. The accountants and doctors headed for the exit.

Peter Triff was lifted up off the floor by his wife and mistress. “Get out you floozy,” his wife shouted at his mistress who retreated shielded by a young doctor who had stood watching the struggle. “Lets go,” he suggested. “These are mad people,” and pulled her away as Peter Triff and his wife staggered toward the door.

When the dust cleared, the band was still playing to a nearly empty ballroom. Nick Strayte and Helen O’Rourke came back onto the dancefloor. The band leader was standing openmouthed on the bandstand looking out at the empty ballroom. “What happened?” Helen O’Rourke asked her companion.

“Who knows,” Nick Strayte said, “It’s a lunatic asylum.”

“One last waltz maestro,” Strayte called to the band leader.

“Make it a sweet one,” said Haddy Washington, rolling herself slowly to the exit where her nephew waited. “Make it a sweet one.” Her hand was still raised.

When the waltz stopped Helen O’Rourke put her head on Nick Strayte’s shoulder.

“I’m bushed.”

“Me too.” They headed for the closet. In the tunnel on the way back Helen O’Rourke was quiet.

“Thinking of Billy,” Strayte asked.

“No. Not of Billy. I’m ashamed to ask this, It never mattered to me, it doesn’t matter to me now, except…”

“Do I like men?” Strayte,” asked for her.”

She turned away. “How did you know?”

“I don’t know I just knew. I just knew. No. But I don’t have a good track record with women though.”

“As long as its women I’ll take my chances.” They walked at little farther. “Will you make love to me?” she asked. “Gently, slowly.”

He looked at her and kissed her softly.

As they came out of the darkened closet the gun she in her shoulder holster glistened in the light.

Chapter 23

Every two people have at least one secret in common. This is a secret we keep from ourselves

After they made love Helen O’Rourke curled in Nick Strayte’s arms and talked.

“How can you stay here?” she asked him.

“You mean with all these lunatics,” he asked. “It’s easy. I told you, you get used to it.”

“Superman?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I used to think that running away was cowardly but now I’m not so sure,” he said softly, “a lot depends on how far you’re willing to run. I’ll have to face the hearings and the crank phone calls eventually but it’s quiet here, peaceful in a way, sometimes at least. That’s not really it,” he confessed. “The patients are mad in a way that I can understand so I can make allowances for it. They don’t force their illogic on me. The outside is a madhouse in a way that is foreign to me.”

“You’re a sociologist,” she pointed out.

“I know that’s what bothers me. I don’t have a clue what is going on.”

“You’re not sure there are going to be crank phone calls.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Go to my house, pick up the phone when it rings. I’ll eat your badge if you don’t hear some wild man screaming, ‘You demented pig fuck. We’ll get you don’t worry, you commie chink pinko shit.’ The cold war never ended for them. They never knew it began. It just always was. It just always is. There’s always an enemy, it’s only a matter of smelling him out, finding out his name and where he lives from the newspaper, his telephone number from the white pages.”

“I’ve got to go,” she said when she woke up after dozing on his chest. “I have to show up for my shift today. I can’t go on pretending to be sick forever.”

“Why not?”

She looked at him. “I just can’t.”

“What are you going to do about Billy?”

“I won’t ride with him if that’s what you want to know. I’ll tell them I’ve suddenly become car sick. The sergeant will find something for me to do until they get me another permanent assignment.”

After she left, Strayte waited anxiously for Superman to show up. When he didn’t, he drifted into a sleep that lasted until the pounding on the door.

“It’s open, it’s open, stop banging,” he yelled as Dr. Heirath pounded. The acting administrator refused to stop pounding until Strayte got out of bed and opened the door for him.

“I wanted you to see me in all my glory. For the first time I feel like the acting medical director, the acting chief psychiatrist and the acting administrator—the head of this hospital.” He did a little turn in front of Strayte. The acting administrator was dressed in hospital whites.

“I could have seen you in all of your glory if you had just come in. The door was open.”

“I didn’t want to embarrass you in case…,” he whispered. “Anyway, It wouldn’t have been the same.”

“She went home.” Strayte turned to the doctor. “She said you’d probably wake us up at some ungodly hour. What time is it anyway?”

“Who’s paying any attention to the time? Almost lunch time, 11:46,” he said. “It was a spectacular Crazy Man’s Ball, wasn’t it?”

Strayte agreed, gurgling “yes,” through his mouth wash. “That it was, doctor. How did the patients like it?”

“I don’t know. We’ll ask them at lunch?”

“Ever been to one before?” Strayte asked.

“No, the help don’t usually go. Last year I was ignored. I was specifically dis-invited to this one. I like being dis-invited more. I’m going to miss going next year. It was the highlight of my social calendar for the decade. I’m starved. Hurry up.”

“Who was at breakfast?”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Heirath said. “I slept late too.”

“One of us should have been there,” Strayte said. “Sometimes they don’t eat as much as they should.”

The doctor looked at him strangely. “Their medicine,” Strayte reminded him, “in the food.”

The doctor broke into a yelping laugh. “You didn’t believe that, did you?”

“It’s not true?” Strayte asked.

“Not since I’ve been here,” the acting administrator said. “Not ever, I think. It’s a rumor that Mash spread to cut down on food expenses. Never worked. They eat even more.”

“Why don’t you tell them?” Strayte asked sharply, annoyed at his gullibility.

“I did, every week for two months. It didn’t help. Nurse G still tells them every week. It doesn’t help. By the way, she looked very spiffy in her uniform, didn’t she?”

“Very spiffy, whatever that means,” Strayte said. “How did…?” He changed his mind about the question. “One of us should have been at breakfast,” he repeated.

The doctor cut him off. “They are mostly good conduct medals.”

“What?”

“All of the stuff on the uniform. Mostly good conduct medals. By the way, I wanted to ask you about a dream,” he said to Strayte suddenly, “to see what kind of sense it makes to you.”

“Your dream?” Strayte asked.

“A dream is a dream,” the Doctor said.

“After breakfast.”

“After lunch,” the doctor corrected him cheerily.

The cafeteria was empty.

“I knew there was going to be trouble,” Strayte said looking at the one patient rummaging around behind the counter near the stove.

“Hello Don,” doctor Heirath said. “Where is everyone else?”

“The refrigerator is empty. I wanted my usual lunch,” Don said. “I was worried that I wouldn’t get my…my…”

“Vitamins,” the Doctor said.

“Yeah,” Don responded. “If I don’t get a really full dose of vitamins at lunchtime I eat dinner with XMan.”

“There are no medicines in the food, Don,” the doctor explained patiently.

“I know,” Don said. “It doesn’t make a difference. If I don’t get what’s not in the food at lunch, I still eat dinner with Xman.”

The doctor peeked into the refrigerator. Beside four eggs and a few slices of bacon the refrigerator was empty. “Where is the food, where’s everyone else, Don?”

“Working. A lot of them are at the restaurant, on line.”

“Go wait with them,” Doctor Heirath said “they put the same vitamins in the food there. Nothing to worry about at all.”

“I’m hungry,” Strayte said after the patient drifted out.

“Want to go to the restaurant and try to catch a quick bite of what they brought from here?”

Strayte looked at the doctor as if he were crazy. “No, I’d prefer to eat here. We should talk. Then we can drift over.”

“Today’s the big day?” the doctor said cheerfully.

“What big day,” Strayte asked.

“Where have you been man, the day the businesses open for business.”

“You are as crazy as they are,” Strayte said testily, “and you should know better. I tried to explain to them that most businesses don’t really make a profit for a long time and most of them belly up long before that. I told them that it took a long time for advertising to catch hold and how difficult getting customers was. Mittleman finally came over and told me I was discouraging them and that everything would be okay. I’m worried that failure will make them really crazy again. They were doing well working.”

“I’ll cook,” the doctor said. “You’re tense. Relax. Sit down and make yourself at home. Maybe they’ll do great,” he yelled as he put the slices of bacon and his finger on the stove. “Crap.”

“The eggs have a little bit of shell in them,” he warned Strayte as he lifted them onto the plates. “Give me a hand will you. The toast is ready.”

“This is nearly inedible,” Strayte said as tried to get the burnt toast to soak up the runny eggs. He searched the bacon for a sliver that was not completely charred.

“I never did get the knack of cooking bacon and eggs. I’m not bad at bouillabaisse. Bacon alone or eggs alone don’t give me any trouble but they don’t taste the same. We can stop at the restaurant and nibble on truffles.”

Strayte was serious. “Getting the patients involved starting businesses was a great occupational therapy but after today when, if we’re lucky, nothing happens at all, we are going to have a collection of crazy and depressed people on our hand. Or something worse.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Heirath reminded him. “‘They will be overwhelmed by rationality, it will swamp them’ to quote someone,” he added.

Strayte tried to grind the crunchy mass in his mouth to paste.”Thanks for reminding me. How long do we have to find them new places?”

“I haven’t heard anything from Mash. None of the members of the board answers my calls. Triff has stopped coming around. I expect they’ll ignore us until we run out of money completely and I have to call them to beg for money to buy food until they discharge most of the patients as cured. If I call begging to give up, they’ll answer my call. I’ve phoned around to see if I couldn’t place the patients en masse. All of the state institutions are closed or full. None of the other places will take more than a few. The city will take two or three, and CTTL will take a couple who are paying. It’s insane.”

“We have patients who are paying?” Strayte asked.

“Yes,” the doctor said, “a few. But the others are going to be out in the cold. Joseff will have company. Haddy Washington called and said…”

“Who’s Haddy Washington?” Strayte wanted to know.

“She’s the only woman on the board, the only live one,” Dr. Heirath said, “besides me. She said Mash has called a meeting of the board for tomorrow night. Emile and Emily said they might have an idea that would slow the board down a little while. They wouldn’t tell me what it was but they asked my permission to go to the meeting. Do you think I should let them go? There’s almost not enough to lose not to, but with them you never can tell.”

Strayte frowned at the doctor.

“I don’t know if I can take more trouble,” Dr. Heirath said hollowly.

“Who are Emile and Emily?” Strayte hissed.

“Patients. Lawyers. They won the dance contest at the Crazy Man’s Ball.”

Strayte stared at the doctor.

“I’ll explain to you later, lets go see how the patients’ businesses are doing.”

“It’s depressing,” Strayte said as they headed for the tunnel.

“Yeah, my pre-suicide is over unless I’m ready for Peachum college which I’m not and you’re going to be tarred as a disreputable lecher and sacked not to mention the crank phone calls.”

“Yes,” Strayte said suspiciously, “and the eggs were more runny than usual. You’re sure you didn’t put anything in the food.”

When they emerged from the closet, the Leonard Mittleman was pacing between the two lines that flowed into the restaurant. “I’ve been trying to get them to take names so that people can go visit the boutique instead of standing in line but he,”—he pointed at a man standing behind a podium under a sign that said ‘Chateau Verms’—”insists that it’s inappropriate for opening day. It doesn’t matter. You can hardly move in the boutique, but it’s the principle of the thing.”

Doctor Heirath and Strayte stood staring at the lines. There were a dozen couples on the shorter of the lines. The other snaked and curled around the waiting room.

“One of them is for people with reservations,” Leonard Mittleman explained, “people with plastic. The other is for the patients. They fill up the tables and nosh until a paying customer comes and they need a table. Then they get up and get on the back of the other line. It’s good business. You’re late. The lunch seating is almost over. You’ll have to wait on…” he pointed to the patient line. “They’re very strict. We can really eat after the seating is over and by then everyone will have lost their appetite and,” he looked at the doctor, “I’m not sure they’ll eat enough.”

The doctor grabbed him by the collar. “There’s is nothing in the food. No one puts anything in the food, hear.”

The businessman shook his head as the doctor released him.

“I’m sorry,” the acting administrator said, “it’s just…”

“I understand,” the businessman said, “it’s O.K. We are all a little tense. Did you see our advertisement?” he asked. He held out a page cut from the sunday edition of the local paper. ‘Chez Verms Novelle Nouvelle cuisine. A new dining experience. Paris in Monrow. Lunch only for opening week. One seating from 11 to 1:30.’ Below the text was a picture of the master chef surrounded by his sous chefs.

Strayte looked at the lines of paying customers and patients and nudged the doctor. “We’re the administration. We go where we want. It’s the natural order of things.” He nudged Heirath toward the entrance of the restaurant.

“Do you have a reservation?” the man staffing the podium asked them as they started in.

“It’s me, Dr. Heirath. You know Dr. Strayte, the acting assistant administrator.”

“I’m sorry. If you do not have a reservation nothing can be done. We are filled up. Of course you can stand on that line,” he said pointing to long snaking line.

Strayte spoke up. “We just want to say hello to a friend who had a reservation. We’ll just be a minute. Hello and goodby, not even a hors d’oeuvre. He took a five-dollar bill from his pocket and handed it to the reservation person.”

“It’s very irregular,” the man handling reservations said very seriously, “but if you only want to see a friend, well.” He handed the bill back to Strayte. “We are crazy,” he whispered to Strayte, “but we do not take bribes. Only a minute and out.”

As soon as they got into the room they headed for the maitre d’. Strayte had seen the man in the library pouring over books in Russian and Greek.

“Business looks like it’s booming,” Dr. Heirath said.

“Yes, We are doing very well for the first day. Would you like to eat? The seating is almost over.”

“Only a bite,” Strayte said.

“You’ll have to share a table,” the maitre d’ said. “I can see you didn’t have a reservation.”

“I’m the acting administrator and he’s the assistant acting assistant administrator,” Heirath complained.

“Well then I’m sure you won’t mind,” he said. “The single tables are for people with plastic and reservations.”

“If we have to,” Strayte said.

The table was crowded. The patients were enjoying themselves. They had napkins around their chins and the plates were piled high with hors d’oeuvres they were eating heartily.

Heirath started a conversation with a patient at the table. “Hello Harold. This is very nice.”

“Very nice,” Harold said, staring intently at the food on his plate.

“What are you thinking about Harold?”

“I was wondering if this food has the same vitamins my regular lunch has.”

“You can be sure of it,” Heirath said.

“I’m thinking of writing a book too,” Harold said.

“That’s a nice idea,” the acting administrator said in his most encouraging voice. “What kind of a book?”

“I was thinking of writing a book on how to slip quietly into insanity. I was thinking of calling it, ‘Pre-insanity: A way in and out.’”

“That’s interesting,” the doctor said although something tugged at his enthusiasm.

“Yes,” Harold replied. “I’ve been thinking about it seriously for a while. I went the hard way, you know. I got up one morning and just made a short u turn completely round the bend. But I think there’s another way to do it that would be easier for most people, a slow, gentle, curve. You could start,” he said, “by seeing some imaginary creature, maybe.”

“Maybe Superman,” Heirath added. Strayte bit his tongue and put his spoon down.

“Superman would be great. Then if you didn’t like being crazy you could put on the brakes, straighten out.”

“I like that idea,” Strayte said, picking up his spoon again.

“Yes,” Harold said. “I think it’s workable.”

“But do you think it would sell?” Dr. Heirath said, shoving a forkful of salad into his mouth.

“I think so. I’ve written four others,” Harold said, imitating the way Dr. Heirath was chewing. “Pre-suicide did very well and Pre-retirement is in it’s fourth printing.”

The doctor coughed out pieces of his salad which clung to his chin. The picture on the back jacket of his copy of Pre-suicide lifted his spoon and nibbled on a piece of lettuce. It was Harold.

“There are a few things I wanted to ask you about Harold,” Heirath said. “Maybe later we can talk.”

“I’d love to Doctor.”

The waiter brought them a series of dishes and set them down. It was one of the sous chefs. “I’m serving today with Bernard. Tomorrow I cook and it’s Sissy’s turn to serve. The chef thought you might want to sample all of the entrees.”

As they finished the last one, the chef came out of the kitchen. He went around from table to table of the paying customers and asked them in French how they liked the meal. Their answers were all complimentary.

As he swung around their table, the doctor got nervous. “No, No,” the chef said.

“These are out special guests today,” he said to everyone. “I am sure one of them would like to say something.”

Heirath kicked Strayte under the table. The sociologist put down his utensil and stood up. “Well the food was exquisite and the decor is quite elegant.” Pictures in the style of early Matisse from the art gallery adorned the walls. Strayte could tell they were from the gallery because each had a card tucked into the corner saying Gallery Verm—Continental art. “The service is refined and efficient and the ambience, unique. I’d say the restaurant provides Monrow with an exceptional new dining experience.”

The chef beamed and everyone applauded brightly.

When the last of the paying diners left, the patients gathered themselves a long line that snaked into the kitchen. The acting administrator and the acting assistant administrator got up to leave. As they were walking out the maitre d’ handed them two trays covered in foil. “If your going to the art gallery would you mind dropping these off. I’m on dish duty today.”

The door to the gallery had a sign that said ‘Gallery Verms: The world of continental art.’

The dealer was giving three well dressed couples an escorted tour. “These were done by…” He leaned close. “Went completely mad,” he said. “A love affair gone wild. These were close to the last paintings he painted. Very sad.”

“And these,” he said, moving to a new group of painting associated with an artist with a vaguely French sounding name. “Notice the curves. They have a life to them these curves. The curves alone are worth the cost of the paintings. Notice how they flutter and come to occupy all of the space. Chaotic order,” he said softly. “Science has just discovered Chaos but this artist intuited chaos from the minute his brush touched paint. They will start a whole new style in curves.”

“And these,” he said, as he steered the group over to the last group of pictures. “These are not really for sale,” he said ignoring the price written on the cards below each frame. “I have a soft spot for the painter. I told him I would hang them, for the exposure you know. I don’t think you want to consider them,” he said. “The last painting that this painter sold was bought by a count in Austria. He took it home and gave it as a surprise birthday gift to his wife. That night, the subtle eroticism of the picture drove her wild. Her arousal drove him wild. They say they were lost in an embrace that took three days and four specialists to disentangle. They burned the painting. It drove the painter mad. His paintings may have some erotic curse attached to them. Some people say it’s the oils he used. I wouldn’t stare at any of them too long, you never can tell.”

“I’ll take all three,” one of the men said, running his finger up the back of the fur coat of the cool blond standing beside him. “I’ll send my car to pick them up this afternoon.” The dealer steered them to the small desk at the front of the gallery and wrapped up the transaction quickly.

“Let me know how they look in the bedroom,” he said to the couple as they were leaving. “Light them from the side.”

“I think we will close for lunch,” the small black man said, coming over to where Strayte and the doctor stood admiring a painting in the style of David. He took off the badge that said ‘Dealer’ and put it in his pocket.

Folding his jacket neatly over the chair behind the small desk he yelled in the back and the artist came out slowly and they sat down together and peeled the foil off the trays. “Here take this,” the black man said to the artist who was staring at the food. “Eat slowly. And this,” he said as he moved the main course from his plate to the artist’s plate. “I’ll get something later.”

“We sold seven paintings and he gave one away.”

“He gave one away?” Strayte exclaimed.

“He gave it away,”the dealer echoed. “Sometimes he does that. He takes a painting off the wall and gives it away. What can you say? He repaints it or something like it right away so it’s not a loss. Always a little different though.”

“I noticed the last three were still lifes. You are going to have a really unhappy customer.”

“I don’t think so,” the dealer said. “Some people are turned on by plants and vegetables.

Strayte commented that the price of some of the paintings had risen to $994 a canvas.

“That’s only in the first three hours. He’s a genius,” he said softly to Strayte.

“You’re a genius. How come the price change?” Strayte asked.

“It’s a marketing principle. If one of a group sells we double the price, if the group goes, we triple the price of the style.”

“Close to,” Strayte said. “Near enough.”

“Did you see the paintings in the restaurant? We sold one of them too. I always knew this was an art loving city,” he said. “He’s working on a new group in the back. “Hush, hush,” he said quietly to the artist who was weeping gently. “He should bring them to their knees.”

“We have to be going,” Strayte said to the black dealer who was helping the artist eat. “It really is fine gallery. I’m sure you will be a complete success.”

“Complete success maybe not,” the dealer said, looking at the artist, “but a grand success, absolutely, absolutely.” As Strayte was leaving the dealer called to him. “Wait a minute” and he ran in the back. “He wanted you to have this,” he said, and handed Strayte a wrapped package about the size of a notebook.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s the painting of the Polaroid of the group of patients falling apart. He said the picture wasn’t true anymore and that you should have it because it might be true for you. He didn’t know. We cut it up, salvaged the canvas. There is a set of patients portraits, called Madness series two. They go on display next week. You must come.” He reached into his pocket for the badge and put it back on.

“I’m not sure I can handle the boutique,” Strayte said, as he tucked the package gently under his arm and walked beside the doctor out the door.

“You can handle it,” the acting administrator said. “You’ve got to. Think of the patients.”

The patients were displaying dresses and suits for customers in the boutique. They moved up and down the crowded aisles.

“Well, you get a feel for what it looks like,” May said, displaying a dress against her body for a woman in her fifties.

“My mother had a dress like that,” the woman explained. “I loved it. I would imagine what it would feel like wearing a dress like that. When I reached my 18th birthday, I asked her for it. “I gave it away,” she said. “I didn’t think I would ever find anything like it. I’ll take it.”

May looked at the $52.98 price tag. “For you, $12.98,” May said.

“I couldn’t take it for that price,” the woman said and wrote out a check for 100 dollars. “Do you have any others like it? My mother had a roomful of dresses like it. She died before…”

“I can look,” May said thoughtfully. “Give me your name and phone number and…tell me what year you were eighteen in.” The woman scrawled her name though tears. “I’m sure we can find something,” May said, helping the woman dry her tears, “I’m sure we can.”

Strayte and the doctor peered over the crowd. Mr. Chameleon was modeling a man’s suit. He was in his dark and swarthy incarnation.

“John,” a woman said to the man next to her, “what do you think.”

“I buy mine new, made to order,” he said, “you know that.”

“But it’s so sexy.”

“I don’t see anything sexy about it. It’s thirty years old.”

“If you don’t want it,” she said, panting, “someone else is going to buy it.”

A man standing next to her leaned over. “Do you really think it’s sexy?” he asked casually.

“It’s unbelievably sexy,” she said.

“I’ll take it,” her husband said, squinting at the stranger next to her. “It does have possibilities.”

Strayte waved to May who was working the crowded room. “See you later,” he said, and gave her a V sign.

“Christ,” said the doctor, “it’s packed, and all it’s selling is used clothing and knick knacks. You’re the Sociologist. Explain it to me.”

“Tomorrow,” Strayte muttered, “tomorrow I’ll explain it to you. Today, I want to think about it a while.”

“The computer programming school is next,” Dr. Heirath said.

“I’m not sure I’m up to it,” Strayte spit out.

“John would be very disappointed if we left him out of the tour.”

They moved down the hall into the room under the sign, ‘Vern Meer’s Correspondence Computer programming school. Vern Meer John prop.’

John John was talking to a thin gaunt man who was inquiring about the school. He excused himself when he saw the acting administrator and Strayte walk in.

“We got some walk in business,” he said incredulously. “I never thought we’d get walk in business. I set them up on a few of the machines here. It’s a kludge job but it seems to be working. A tangle of wires led from the machines at the desks to a black box in the corner. “I have to go back and finish talking to him. He’s computer phobic,” he said, “a bad case. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Strayte and the doctor listened.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of with computers. They’re really very friendly. You just have to learn to listen and talk to them. And our program is individualized. It’s different for each student.”

“I can’t type,” the man explained.

“You don’t have to really type. Typing is definitely not essential.”

One of the other walk in students hunched over the keyboard a few desks away waved his hand wildly. John excused himself again from the skeptical customer and went over to him.

“This is the keyboard, right,” the man said.

“Right. There’s the picture on the screen.”

“Where’s the carriage return?”

“It’s the key with the bent arrow.”

“Oh,” the man said. “I hit it with my finger and nothing happened.”

The proprietor of the computer school reached over and touched the carriage return lightly. The cursor jumped. “Well you might not be hitting it quite right. He looked at the screen which was filled with brackets. “Perhaps you hit another key. I can make an adjustment in the program that will help. I guarantee you will only make each mistake once,” he said. But you’ve got to pay attention to the screen. You have to look at it and do what it tells you, otherwise you won’t get the imitation candied truffle you were promised.” The man looked doubtful as the programmer sat down and typed some lines of code into the machine.

“Try again,” he said, “remember the key with the arrow. Pay attention.” Then he returned to gaunt man he had been talking to. “The computer adjusts to you. It’s very friendly especially if you listen really hard.”

A scream went up from the man hunched over the computer who tore his fingers away from the keyboard.

“The key with the arrow,” the computer programmer yelled at him. “Watch the screen. I guarantee only once per mistake.” The person looked over suspiciously, rearranged his hands on the keyboard and stared at the screen. He touched the key with the arrow very gingerly and watched the white block on the screen jump.

“I did it,” he said enthusiastically.

“I knew you could,” the proprietor said. “Keep working on it. See,” he said, “just like I told you. Only once per mistake. Watch the screen.”

“Different strokes for different folks,” he said turning back to the man he was talking to. “He’s computer deaf. We have to take a different tack with him. With you, if you listen, you can tell the machine what to do. It’s very user friendly. Do you want to try?”

The man hesitated.

“If it doesn’t work, you haven’t lost anything have you?” John John cajoled. “Do you have many friends?”

“No,” the man said.

“Neither do I. The computer can be your friend. Give it a try.”

“Why not,” the man said as he was led to a machine near the tumble of wires that connected to the black box in the front of the room. “It works better if you put on these earphones. They’re not essential really, but it helps a little.” He put the earphones gently on his student’s head and switched the computer on. “Give it a try.”

John John returned to his conversation with Strayte and the acting administrator. “I really think it’s going to work. Walk in customers. I never thought I’d have to deal with walk in customers. It’s not bad though.” Behind him the man hunched over the keyboard gave out another scream. He turned to him and yelled. “Watch the screen. Watch the screen. He’s a slow learner. Look,” he said pointing to a woman in front of a reworked Apple. “She’s good.” Strayte saw a complicated pattern growing on the screen.

“Is she writing the program that’s producing that?” Strayte asked.

“Part of it. She’s making the little box in the middle. The rest will come,” the computer maven said proudly.

“Very nice,” Strayte said. “Maybe 450 volts is a little much,” he added.”Why don’t you try sixty or so?”

“After he’s had 450, 60 won’t do anything at all for him. But after three mistakes in a row the keyboard freezes up and it won’t let him hit anything except the right key. We’ll see,” he said.

“We’ve got to be going,” Strayte said to the doctor. “The hot line.”

“Oh,” said the doctor fascinated with the activity before him. “Maybe I could come back later and try. I never was any good at computers at all.”

“Here,” the John John said, holding out a disk. “If you want to escape somewhere and practice, here would be fine, but you could try in your office. You have a computer there.”

“Do I?” the doctor asked.

“You certainly do. Your secretary used to use it to call an erotic bulletin board. This disk will work fine in it. Let me know if you have any problems.”

“I will,” said the doctor as Strayte pulled him out.

“What was that man screaming about?” he asked Strayte.

“You really don’t want to know,” the acting assistant administrator said, “you really don’t want to know.”

He let the administrator lead him to the hotline. Everyone was glued to the phone.

“There was a foul up with the phone company,” Frank Hymut announced, intercepting them at the door. “They won’t have the 900 number connected until this afternoon.”

“What are they doing?” Strayte asked. “They all seem to be talking on the phone.”

“Oh they are practicing,” Frank Hymut explained. “Half of them call the other half and pretend to be going crazy, then they reverse roles and the one who gave the advice calls the other and…”

“We get the idea.”

Strayte pointed to a few people with a phone in each hand.

“They are talking to themselves. I tried to tell them it wasn’t good practice but they insisted. I think we’ll have all of the bugs worked out later today.”

“I hope so,” Dr. Heirath said. “It’s a shame to waste that good advice.”

“Do you think they can hurt anyone?” he asked Strayte as they slipped out the door. “They’re not licensed psychiatrists or psychologists or anything.”

“No, they’re certified nut cases,” Strayte said, “they’re as expert on going crazy as you can get. Now advice on getting sane, that’s a different matter.”

“How about the bookstore?” the doctor asked.

“In for a dime in for a dollar,” Strayte said.

“In for a yen in for a pickle,” a patient wandering in the hall echoed.

“Why not?” Strayte said, “why not.”

The sign over the bookstore said. V.M.R books. Guaranteed reading for the whole family. The sign on the door said ‘Not open for business yet. Soon.’ The doctor pushed the door open.

“We’re not ready for customers yet,” the librarian yelled before she saw who came in. “Oh. it’s you. We’re not ready yet,” she complained. “I’ve discovered a mistake. Some of the patients who brought books up put them in the wrong sections.” She was working on the erotica section.

“Are we selling erotica?” Strayte asked.

“Only to adults who want it. I think we have one of the best collections of Erotica east of the Vatican,” she said proudly. Strayte noticed a section marked FAMILY READING: CLEAN BOOKS GUARANTEED.

“What’s this section?” he asked.

“Oh, those are some books from the patient library,” she said. “I’ve gone through every one of them and taken out any wrong things that crept in. Strayte picked a volume from the clean book section.

The abridgment of the Bible had a few barely noticeable emendations, ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ a few more. Einstein’s ‘How I See the World’ had a correction on every page and ‘Huckleberry Finn’ was nearly unintelligible.

“Have you worked on those too?” he asked pointing to the Erotica section.

“Why should I do that?” she asked. “They’re clear enough. No need to change them, It’s these other books that bad things have crept into. These need the work.”

“I see,” said Strayte. “Well we’ve got to be going. I hope you get things sorted out quickly.”

“We will,” she said, “we will. Drop in tomorrow for our grand opening.”

“Certainly,” Strayte said. “We definitely will, tomorrow or the next day.”

Strayte and the doctor walked silently through the tunnel back to the ward. The doctor held out a truffle cluster he had taken from the hors d’oeuvre table of the restaurant. Strayte took a nibble.

“These aren’t bad are they.”

“Doufou disguised as peanuts. They taste like Truffles,” the doctor said.

“I was wondering,” the doctor said.

“What,” Strayte squeezed out between chews.

“Do you think the boutique has a decoder ring for sale. I had one when I was a kid. My parents gave away a collection of my toys when I went to camp one summer.”

“You never can tell,” Strayte said, “you never can tell.”

Chapter 24

Babies are natures way of explaining sex in exactly the same way in which fat is natures way of explaining food

After the fiasco at the ball Martin Mash was glad he had agreed to go along with Peter Tiff’s plan to close the hospital. The social event of the year was a complete bust.

The gift he had counted on to return him a fortune, the painting he had intended to give Peter Triff, had been permanently disfigured. The painter whose suicide he had counted on to jack up the price of his paintings had appeared from nowhere and disappeared to nowhere. Between his arrival and his departure he had permanently altered the gift with whiskey and cake frosting. What was earlier a quiet landscape with a pine tree and a frog and crickets was now a portrait of a wild man. The paintings he had held in reserve until the price was right were worthless.

Everyone held him responsible for the failure of the Crazy Man’s Ball. The few people who did not reproach him for the fact that the food ran out, blamed him for giving the award the Man of the Year award to a person who lacked the common sense not to rub in their faces the irrelevant fact that the Crazy Man’s Ball had something to do with crazy people.

And everyone felt that getting himself thrown out at the moment at which he was going to present the award and then appearing suddenly on stage again and becoming Triff suddenly and accepting the award showed was the act of a desperate man with a guilty conscience and a vicious sense of humor. They even held him responsible for the fight Triff had with the two women wearing the same dress and his accountant, who was threatening a law suit.

When he looked at the evening the only thing he reproached himself for was going along with the plan cooked up by the former medical chief and the now traveling administrator of the hospital to saddle a doctor they did not know with responsibility for running the hospital. As the lawyer for the board he should have realized that they had no foundation for judging that Heirath was incompetent. What he alone was responsible for was not cutting the liver doctors balls off on the spot when he refused to go along with the closing of the hospital.

All that was bad enough. But after the dance he started getting crank calls from a businessman who had struck a deal with someone at the ball whose name he did not quite remember. “A tall man, in a brown tuxedo, a little wild looking,” was his description. “I traded him a watch for a Mont Blanc pen. It didn’t have a point but the barrel and cap were in excellent shape. He was talking about a barter deal, Chinese missiles, computers from Singapore, chips from El Salvador, Arab oil and Israeli oranges. A lot of money. I just don’t remember his name. When I looked at the business card I thought he gave me it was blank. I was wondering if you knew him.”

“I don’t have the least idea who you are talking about,” Martin Mash said. “Maybe it was one of the liver doctor’s gate crasher friends.” He referred to Doctor Heirath on whom he blamed all his troubles as the gatecrasher. “Do I know you?” he asked the caller.

“Bill Peters, we’ve met, I’m in factors. You looked great on the podium,” he said, “better than I’ve seen you in a long time. Well, maybe you’ll remember his name tomorrow.”

Closing Vermeers as quickly as possible became an attractive idea, much more attractive than it was when Triff first raised the notion. He wanted to put as much distance between himself and anything to do with the lunatic asylum as soon as he could. Which is exactly what he told Peter Triff when the psychiatrist returned his call. “What the hell is wrong with that beeper of yours, I called you three hours ago,” he screamed at the psychiatrist.

“It hasn’t worked quite right since the…for a while,” he said. The Crazy Man’s Ball had been a disaster for him too.

“I’ve scheduled a board meeting for Wednesday of next week. Can you have all of the papers you need so we can complete the sale to this corporation of yours by then?”

“I think so, not everything will be in place, but enough to handle the purchase, I think.”

“I hope so. Who’s doing the legal work? Do I know him?”

“No, a hired gun from out of town, my backers legal counsel.” He couldn’t bring himself to say his stepmother, his father’s fluzzy, had offered to back him behind his father’s back if he cut her in for a chunk of the action. She obviously knew someone who had a lot of money.

“I’d like to look over the papers before I sign them,” Mash said. “In fact I insist.”

“Why?” the psychiatrist wanted to know.

“Because I’m the lawyer for the board you fart and I don’t trust your ass farther than I can fling it, which will happen if you try any funny stuff.”

“Makes sense to me,” Peter Triff said. “I’ll make sure you get them before the board meeting,” and his beeper went off over the phone. “Emergency,” he said and hung up.

“You shit,” Martin Mash cursed and flung down the phone.

As good as his word the psychiatrist showed up with a telephone book sized folder of papers a half hour before the board meeting.

“I can’t read all of this now. There’s only a half hour before the meeting,” Mash said, glaring at him.

“It’s O.K.. Everything is on the up and up,” Triff contended. His father’s wife stood behind him looking over his shoulder. “It says were going to buy the hospital for a value to be determined by a mutually acceptable appraiser. We have someone in mind. I’m sure it will be acceptable to the board.”

“What happens if there’s trouble?”

“The hospital reverts to the board. Anything else?”

“How soon can you have the cash?”

“Yesterday,” the floozy standing behind the young psychiatrist said sweetly.

They went into the meeting.

As soon as he walked through the door, Martin Mash knew something was wrong. The room which was to have held the usual senile, dozing, members of the board, was packed with unfamiliar faces. He spun around to Triff who had a surprised look on is face. “Are all of these people yours?”

“No, I don’t know any of them,” the young psychiatrist replied.

The unknown guests filled the seats in the back which were for show and usually held only coats and canes. The patient who usually served coffee and snacks stood in the corner looking like a cupboard.

“How did they find out about this meeting?”

“Beats me. Who are they? Triff asked?”

“I haven’t the least idea,” Mash said angrily.

“I hate surprises,” the young psychiatrist said.

Martin Mash smelled a rat. In the back of the room a group of Japanese hunkered together and babbled, a nondescript couple made eyes at one another and argued about something or other, and a vaguely familiar tall man wearing Texas sized hat sat whispering instructions to a phalanx of MBA’s pressed against his back.

Haddy washington looked at the board members. They were dozing off as usual. But Martin Mash looked worried and Peter Triff was genuinely anxious. She looked forward to whatever the trouble was.

Mash moved quietly to the front of the room.

“I want to welcome all of our guests, whoever they are.”

The MBA’s murmured softly.

“This meeting has been called to accept a final an offer for the property of the foundation that supports Vermeers. The board has reviewed the proposals that have been submitted before the meeting of the board and we…”

One of the Japanese severed himself from the group and stood up.

“Very much to be excused,“ he said. “We have come to make another offer, a much better offer, we believe.” He stroked his cheek with his thumb as if he were writing a character on his face. “Our offer is for Vermeers as it stands now the hospital, complete and entire, patients and all.”

“Who are you?” Mash asked.

“Not at liberty to say now.”

“I’ve come to present the board with an offer they can’t refuse,” the mouth under the big hat interrupted. “Biggest mall in the whole damned country, right here. It will make the people who know about it early—he winked at Mash—a fortune.”

“Who are you?” Mash insisted on knowing.

“Tex, just call me Tex.”

“Gentleman, gentlemen whoever you are. I’m afraid you’re too late. The board,” he said speaking for the nodding heads, “has decided on the offer of the Triff group. The uses…”

The couple who had been quietly arguing in the corner rose and the woman spoke.

“What arrangements have been made for the transfer of the patients to other institutions of comparable quality?”

“What are you talking about?” Martin Mash exploded.

“I’m afraid no deal can be consummated, in the legal sense, formally or informally, until the arrangements have been made for the relocation of the patients who have been certified as crazy. Emily looked dreamily at Emile who picked up her point. “The codicil to the hospital charter specifies very clearly that no transfer of hospital property whatsoever can be made until every patient resident in the hospital and certified as insane is placed in another institution at the expense of the hospital. This is merely a restatement of the state statutes governing mental hospitals, articles forty-three and forty-four, which stipulate…” Emily poked him. “Have arrangements been made? I’m afraid the board can’t accept an offer from anyone until that is done.”

“Recently the patients have showed a remarkable improvement, most of them are approximating sane,” Martin Mash said. Peter Triff nodded in agreement.

The Peter Triff’s father’s floozy glared at both of them and gathered up her things.

“According to the reports filed last month with the state mental health bureau, all of the patients currently residing in the hospital were certified by Dr. Peter Triff as absolutely not sane,” the female member of the standing pair stated.

“Well because of this sudden very rapid improvement some of them could be discharged as temporarily demented,” the young psychiatrist announced.

“Discharging a patient certified by a licensed psychiatrist as ill is a violation of both federal statute D24.a and the state statutes governing the operation of mental health facilities section 44 and 47,” Emile stated.

As he handed one of the Japanese businessman a cup of tea, the person handing out snacks mimicked the look on Martin Mash’s face.

Mash flung down his gavel. “O.K., I don’t know what’s happening but this is what we will do.” He tried to take the strict attitude of his father when he was telling his mother that once a month was more than healthy for a married woman. “We’ll meet here again in two weeks. By that time the problem of relocating the patients will have been solved, I guarantee it. In the meantime whoever has a proposal for the board to consider should submit it in writing by next week at the latest.”

“Heres ours,” the Japanese said together.

“And ours,” said the large hat. Each of the MBAs held out a folder.

“Here’s my proposal,” Peter Triff said, transferring the telephone book to Mash.

“We’d of course like to a make the presentation in person at a special Sushi lunch for the board,” the spokesman for the Japanese stated.

The board members stirred.

“No, that won’t be necessary,” Mash announced bruskly. The board members put a disapproving look on their face and resumed their genteel nodding. “The board can decide from the proposals submitted which of the competitors has a plan for the foundations assets that is in the best interests of the patients and the community.”

“And Martin Mash and Peter Triff,” Haddy Washington muttered under her breath her hand swaying sluggishly.

The patient who was serving coffee poured himself a cup and smiled Martin Mashes smile broadly.

Chapter 25

It is only to animals that hop about that flying is spectacular

After the board meeting was over Martin mash called his paralegal.

“Tiny, I need you quick.”

“It’s late. I’ll be in tomorrow.”

“I need you now!” he said, “it will take you three days to plow through this paper.”

“What paper?”

“Never mind what paper just come over.”

His paralegal grunted and hung up.

Martin Mash knew his paralegal called him names behind his back. It was out of spite because Mash called him Tiny even though he was six foot four. Not that it mattered. Martin Mash had him by the balls and the snot could call him anything he wanted.

Tiny had just graduated law school when the senior partners of the firm that he had just started working for had the bad luck to be caught in one of the freak summer squalls that sometimes beset the commodities market.

In the tempest, the prices of grains and animal parts and precious metals were whipped like leaves in the wind, soaring and diving until finally they glided to rest in a hole as deep as the Bay of Fundy.

They carried with them all of the funds that the partners had borrowed from the escrow account of a wealthy family who had the bad fortune to die in a real squall that sank their yacht in the Bahamas within sight of land.

Since there did not seem to be a surviving heir the loss of their clients funds seemed like a negligible problem. They would replace the money they had used to speculate in pork bellies and tin at their leisure. When an heir showed up with a shyster from Los Angeles they were caught high and dry in the drought that often follows quick storms, or Tiny, the recent law school graduate, was caught was caught high and dry.

His only mistake had been to complain too loudly at having to sign papers he knew constituted a felony offense.

“Sign them,” the most senior of the partners had insisted, “otherwise you’re out. You’ll never get another job anywhere in the state.” “In the country,” said the partner with connections in other states. “In the world,” said the partner responsible for international work.

“It’s a felony. We’re stealing,” Tiny complained, “I won’t.” Then he signed.

“Maybe we’re making a mistake letting him sign all of those papers,” the most senior partner thoughtfully suggested the next day.

“Yes,” the others agreed. “He knows too much.”

After that, his secretary signed his name for him on all of the important documents. He was left to protest and complain to the senior partners, up to the very day he was arrested, about the negligible little criminal acts they permitted him to acknowledge being saddled with.

From the day he was indicted until the day the trial ended the law firm’s partners protested that they had been taken in by his youthful appearance and intimidated by the fact that he was six foot four and that the only thing they had been guilty of was misplaced trust and lax supervision. In public they blamed everything on him. Behind the scenes they assured him that, if he kept his mouth shut, they would take care of his wife and children and work night and day for his release and reinstatement to the bar. When he went to jail for five years they promoted his secretary and forgot about him and his wife and two children.

Martin Mash’s father told his son the young lawyers story as a way of encouraging him to work hard and stay rich. “If you’re poor, people shit all over you,” he admonished his son. “He was a cracker jack lawyer, the only problem was he was poor. If he hadn’t been poor he would have quit or finked out when he finally came to trial. But he was poor, poor. I didn’t have anything against him except that he was poor but it was him or me and the four other senior partners. Poor is just no good,” he insisted.

Martin Mash remembered the story. When the disbarred lawyer was finally released from prison, he came to Martin Mash to try to collect something on the debt owed him by Martin’s father. Martin offered him a job. “You’ll be my paralegal. Not formally of course, I mean what would people say if they knew I had hired an ex-convict. But you’ll work at a paralegal’s pay. Formally, you can be a filing clerk. I’ll use whatever clout I have, pull whatever strings I can to get you readmitted to the bar.”

“I won’t sign any papers that are illegal,” the ex-convict said.

“Of course not,” Martin Mash assured him, “of course not. How could you? You’re an ex-convict, not even a lawyer any more.”

When the clerk came over to his office at Vermeers, Martin Mash gave him the papers.

“This sucks shit,” the lawyer for the board said. “What I thought would be a simple bump and run operation has turned into the beginnings of my kind of lawyer’s nightmare. I don’t know who is to blame but I suspect that young psychiatrist has been running around shooting off his mouth or the gate crashing liver doctor has gotten some of his friends in the medical mafia to whisper things in people’s ears. Look these over and let me know what you think. If we pull this off I think I can get you re-admitted to the bar on a political technicality. I need your evaluation of whatever these papers say and I need it yesterday.”

The ex-lawyer who had long ago realized that Martin Mash’s promises were complete bullshit took the papers from him.

“They all look legitimate,” he told Martin Mash when he returned the papers to him three days later. “I’ve typed up a report.”

“Never mind the typing tell me what’s up.”

“They all want to buy the hospital grounds from the foundation. The Japanese buyers are from Harakawee corporation. They propose to maintain the hospital as a for profit mental health center. They assert it can be made profitable by introducing Japanese techniques, particularly quality control circles, into the patient culture. The second proposal from Tex proposes to demolish the hospital and put up the largest mall this side of the Mississippi. Triff’s group plans to build a new computerized facility. It will be the start of a chain of computerized madhouses. Evidently the group plans to franchise computerized lunatic asylums. Eventually, they will tear down most of the hospital keeping the most recently built wing as a demonstration site. All of them have proposed the same procedure for determining the price. They suggest finding a mutually acceptable appraiser and letting him decide the price. They agree to pay whatever he establishes as the value of the property. They all submitted the same name as their choice.”

“Don’t tell me let me guess,” Martin Mash said. “Frank Tunerey.”

“Yes.”

“He was the city’s real estate appraiser when the hospital was first built. Even my father was embarrassed at the value he set for the property. I expect they believe he will make the same assessment of the real estate now. He’s barely alive. Of course, his being on the board won’t hurt either. Is he still city appraiser?

“His son is,” Tiny said. “I had a friend of mine check out the Japanese. The parent corporation of Harakawee corporation is Nagahusi Chemicals, a firm specializing in genetically engineered pharmaceuticals. They are owned by a gear manufacturer. The Harakawee organization was formed very recently, probably only to submit a bid for the hospital. A little bit strange.”

“Who knows about Japs,” Mash replied, “What about the developer?”

“Tex. There have been rumors that he’s into some sort of shady business but on the surface he appears to be legitimate. He’s not really a Texan. He’s a local boy who made good. His name is Buford Gundsel. He’s the major share holder in a corporation that owns three of the largest malls in the country. Some indian tribe holds a tiny piece of the action. His wife disappeared just before he built the first mall. Just dropped out of sight. He never remarried, lives with a former actress.

“Screw them all,” Martin Mash said. “Did the Japs or the developer say how they found out the hospital was going to be sold?”

“No, why should they?”

“I don’t know. Who knows what they put in these documents. O.K. Tiny. Anything else?”

“No, that’s all.”

“Very nice, Tiny. What would you recommend?”

Tiny was silent.

“Oh come on,” Mash said. “We both know that I’m your only hope of being reinstated to the bar. The person I have working on it says it’s almost in the bag. What would you recommend?”

“Only Triff’s group makes any provision about what happens if their deal falls through. You should probably insist that the others agree that if anything goes wrong the hospital reverts to the board. It would be a kind of insurance.”

“And,” Mash said.

Tiny bit his lip. He hated to tell the low life how to cover his ass. “If there’s any public fight for the hospital you’re going to be in deep shit, I mean the board will be in trouble. The assessment will be a joke. Someone will sue the you for mismanagement of the foundations assets. One person on the board and they have standing. You should get them to try to work out a deal of some sort.”

“What sort of a deal?” Mash asked.

“I don’t know, you’re the lawyer, I’m just an ex-con file clerk,” he said and walked out the door. “You toad,” Tiny said when the door slammed shut. “You fucking toad.”

Martin Mash thought the situation over and decided Tiny had put his finger on the real potential problem. A fight would be disastrous. The idea of getting the competitors together and working something out was appealing. He yelled to his niece who was working as his secretary since she quit her job as secretary to the acting administrator liver doctor. “Louise, come in here.”

“Why,” Louise wanted to know.

“Because I have work for you to do.”

“I’m not back from lunch yet.”

“As soon as you get back from lunch then,” he conceded. He treated her with kid gloves not only because blood was thicker than water and she was family, but also because she was privy to the financial arrangements he had with the hospital suppliers and had been his snitch when she was the liver doctor’s secretary. Hiring relatives was a bad idea. He picked up the phone and dialed Triff’s beeper.

Triff returned the call almost immediately. “I was just going to call you. What’s up with those yellow and red necked honkies. How did they find out about that the foundation was going to close the hospital?”

“How do I know. We’re in trouble. Their bids are as legitimate as yours.”

“If they’re as legitimate as mine,” Triff said, “there should be no trouble getting rid of them.”

“Not so fast,” Mash barked. “If there is a whisper of this whole operation in public it’s dead. I’m setting up a private meeting, you, me, the Japs and Tex. Tomorrow, At noon. Well send out for food,” he said and hung up.

He dialed the number of big hat. Tex picked it up on the first ring.

“Hello Mash,” he said.

“How did you know it was me,” Martin Mash asked.

“Who else should it be. Well, how does my offer look?”

“Very nice, only…”

“Only what. None of the other of those pimps even came close.”

“That’s a minor consideration,” Mash said. “If there’s publicity because anyone feels their proposal hasn’t gotten a fair shake there will be trouble.”

“I was afraid those Japs wouldn’t just fold up their Toyotas. They’re whimpering, eh.”

“Not yet. I want to try to head it off.”

“You want a meeting, tomorrow, just the principals, the boards office probably, at noon?”

The lawyer for the hospital was dumbfounded. “How did you know…?”

“Mash,” he said, “I own three malls that cover hundreds of acres of the heartland of America. You think I can’t anticipate what a piss ante deal maker like you is thinking. I’ll see you all then,” and he hung up.

Mash dialed the last name on his list, Torosuko.

“Harakawee corporation,” a voice with a valley accent said.

“Mr. Torosuko, please.”

“I’m sorry Mr. Torosuko isn’t in right now. He was scheduled for an appointment in Tokyo now. Can you call back tomorrow?”

“It’s important I get hold of him today.”

“Hold on a moment, I’ll transfer your call.”

“Harakawee corporation,” a Japanese accented voice said. “Tokyo branch. Miss Rikoyo speaking.”

“I want to speak to Mr. Torosuko.”

“Sorry, missed him. Recently left. On airplane.”

“It’s important I speak to him,” Mash pleaded.

“Hold on, transferring call.”

“Shimatsu Airlines. Flight attendant Sumore speaking. Fly Shimatsu Airlines to all the cities of the Orient and Boston. How can I help you?”

“I want to speak to Mr. Torosuko.”

“Just a minute I’ll check my passenger list. Yes, Mr. Torosuko was on the flight. The passengers have just deplaned. I’m sorry. I’ll forward your call.”

“Torosuko here,” the voice of the Japanese man who had attended the board meeting said.

“This is Martin Mash, from…”

“Vermeers’ foundation. Yes. Hold on moment, please. There was the sound of a toilet flushing. The proposal was acceptable?”

“Well,” Mash said,” there were three.”

“Yes, but ours was the best, yes.”

“It doesn’t matter whose was the best if there is—he made his voice imitate the toilet’s flush—trouble.”

“I understand. It is very important to avoid American trouble,” the Japanese accented trouble even louder. “American trouble is to be avoided at all cost.”

“I want to have a meeting of all of the people who are interested in hospital. Perhaps we can talk it over and work something out.”

“Work something out sounds fine, avoiding American trouble is an excellent idea. When?”

“Tomorrow at noon, at the board room.”

“OK will be there definitely. I will bring Sushi.”

“No, no Sushi. We will order out,” Mash said and hung up. Trouble was to be avoided and tomorrow was not soon enough to start avoiding it.

The traffic on the road to Vermeers was exceptionally heavy as Mash drove to the meeting and there were an unusual number of cars parked outside the second wing of the hospital when he slid his Mercedes into its customary parking space.

“What’s going on at the hospital?” Mash asked Louise when he got to his office.

“I don’t know,” Louise said demurely, “you made me quit remember.”

“Well, make a note that I should look into it. The gate crasher may be up to something. Go get us lunch from somewhere. There must be somewhere close,” he told her.

“I’ve worked here for years, there’s nowhere close. Where should I get lunch?” she whined.

“I don’t know, Go ask the guard. If you can’t find anything close maybe the hospital’s kitchen can put something together. Nothing elaborate. Pizza or hamburgers.”

When Mash got to the board room only Triff was absent.

“It’s only a quarter to 12,” he said to the two men who were glaring at one another from opposite ends of the table. “I’m sure Dr. Triff will be here momentarily.”

20 minutes later Triff came huffing up the stairs. “My beeper has an alarm but…”

“Stick your beeper,” Mash shouted. “Sit down.”

As he started to speak Louise barged in with a man in a waiter’s uniform carrying a large covered tray.

“You won’t believe this Uncle Mash. I got us lunch. There’s…”

“Zip it, Louise. Disappear. Go back to the office. This is an important meeting.”

“But Uncle Mash,” she whined.

“I don’t want to hear about it, understand, whatever it is I don’t want to hear about it.” His niece slammed the door as she went out.

The waiter set down the tray on an oak table in the corner and disappeared into the woodwork.

Mash turned to the three men who sat well separated from one another around the table.

“Lunch will have to wait for a little while gentleman. I’ve called you here because we have a problem. I was hoping we could work something out, something that would be mutually beneficial to…”

“Nothing to work out,” the tall Japanese said. “Our deal is best. For hospital, for community, for patients. We want to invest in America, to bring Japanese quality techniques to area of mental health. Japanese crazy people very happy, very…”

“Bullshit,” Tex cried. “You give don’t give a shit about America, as far as I know you don’t even give a shit about Japan. The only thing Nakaboto cares about is collecting Van Goghs and getting…”

“Who is Nakaboto?” Mash asked, a little confused.

“He’s the gangster this clown works for,” Tex shouted, “the head of Nagahusi Chemicals. Nagahusi Chemical is a Genetic engineering shop. You don’t want the hospital you want Tull.”

“Genetic engineering?” Mash repeated with a puzzled look on his face. Tex seemed to know about the Japanese.

“What’s a Tull?” asked Triff.

“We would prefer not to talk about this,” the Japanese said, “Very hush hush.”

“I’ll tell you,” Tex said. “Tull is a Nobel nut case who wants to repopulate the world in his image. The government is still looking for him. The Japs want him and are willing to buy the hospital to get him. I’m right aren’t I you sneaky…”

“We sneaky. Your are fraud completely,” Mr. Torosuko screamed.

“My offer couldn’t be simpler, pure Americana,” Tex yelled.” Sell me the hospital. My corporation tears it down and puts up a mall, biggest friggin mall east of the Mississippi. It will put this town on the map, make a fortune for anyone who’s smart enough to jump on board early.”

“Not so pure and not so simple Mr. Tex,” Mr. Torosuko said, leaping into the fray. “Mall use only fraction of land. Rest resold to Indians.

“Indians,” Mash repeated. The puzzled look on his face deepened. The Japanese seemed to know about Tex.

“There was a reservation on this land a long before the white man…bodies are buried…” Tex sputtered. “I’m not selling I’m giving a piece of their ancient homeland back to them. Native Americans have been screwed…”

“But not by you yet,” Torosuko said, “you have agreement to run casino Indians build.”

Tex slumped in seat. “You pricks.”

Triff hated surprises. He had a hard time following what was going on. He leaned forward. “Given all of this confusion, I think my offer is probably the bet for the board,” the young psychiatrist said. “I only want to franchise computerized lunatic asylums. Nothing complicated, no Indians, no casinos, no genetic engineers.”

“You couldn’t franchise a shit shop you wus,” Tex shouted, unhappy that his interest in gambling had been revealed. “You think your father’s fluzzy is backing you, you putz. Where could she get the kind of money we’re talking about? You’re being set up.”

Martin Mash was now thoroughly confused. He had almost followed it, almost but the business about Tull and the Indian casinos and Peter Triff’s father’s fluzzy was too much. “Obviously some of us have done our homework,” he said glaring at Peter Triff. “But I think I can see a way out. Triff doesn’t need much land for his hospital, probably only as much as the building occupies now. That leaves all of the rest for Tex here and the Indians. Mr.Torosuko doesn’t need anything at all except Tull whom I am sure could be delivered by Universal transportation to the airport. If you people were able to do the kind of homework you did you should be able to arrange a quick quiet flight to Tokyo. Perhaps Tex could help. That leaves everyone satisfied. We would have to form some corporate shell to assure cooperation.”

The competitors pulled themselves back in their chairs and thought for a moment. Their hands mumbled silently. Their lips moved in silent dialogues then rested. Their eyes went soft and they relaxed. They agreed.

Mash looked around. He had done it. He could see it. He sat back. For all of his incompetence he had done it. He found a solution to problem that would have baffled Solomon. It would give him leverage over Triff to reshape the split of the enterprise. He felt good. The world was a good place. He smiled. There was only one thing that bothered him.

“How did you know that the board was going to close the hospital and sell it,” he asked Torosuko.

“He has spies in the hospital,” Tex said a little bit of jealousy seeping into his voice as he pointed to Torosuko.

“They are employees of Nagahusi gone nutty.”

“And you?” he turned to Tex.

“I tell you,” Mr. Torosuko chimed in. “His wife is in the hospital. He has kept poor sane lady there for five years,” he said, his voice vibrating with admiration, “with connivance of the old administrator and her lawyer who is his lawyer really.”

“And how did you know that?” Mash asked, not quite sure he wanted to know.

“Her lawyer works for Nagahusi too,” Mr. Torosuko said.

Peter Triff was pleased with himself. He had survived the surprises. He would have his franchise of computer run lunatic asylums. He would become very rich. Things were looking up. He would worry about his father’s fluzzy later. But he was puzzled.

“How did you know about my father’s fluzzy and what’s this about be being set up?” he asked the broadly smiling man in the Texas hat who had his arm around the tall Japanese.

“You really don’t want to know, son, you really don’t.”

From the corner a dark and swarthy voice came drifting across the room. “Should I serve lunch now?” Mr. Chameleon asked smiling Mashes smile.

Chapter 26

It may be true that, in the long run, a group can survive by doing the wrong thing for the right reason as well as it can survive by doing the right thing for the wrong reason. It is questionable whether the long run includes tomorrow

By the time he got to his office Martin Mash felt incredibly good. He knew he was feeling exceptionally good because he wondered if anybody he knew really had the political clout to get his paralegal readmitted to the bar. Then he dismissed the idea. He still might need him. He wasn’t feeling that good.

He took the elevator up to his office. Louise was sulking behind her desk. He wondered how he gotten along without a secretary all of these years until he remembered that for years he really hadn’t done any real work and hadn’t needed one. It was only this flurry of activity associated with closing the hospital that had generated the work that made a secretary useful.

Her long face reminded him just how good he felt. “Why are you sulking?” She looked up at the ceiling.

“I’m sorry about yelling at you yesterday,” he said. “Let me take you to lunch,” he said.

She pulled her face in and took out her makeup.

“After this is over, I might buy a lunatic asylum. You can be chief secretary. You can have a secretary. “

“What would I do with a secretary uncle Martin?” she asked recovering from her sulk.

While she was adjusting her face his mind wandered. He tried to remember the exact connection between them. Was she his brother’s daughter or his wife’s brothers daughter? No matter what the connection, making it with a niece might not be incest, under the strictest interpretation of the law anyway.

“That food that you brought yesterday to the meeting. It was very very good. We can go to the place you bought it for lunch. Where did you get it?”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you yesterday, uncle Martin. She almost sank into a sulk again. “I got it at the hospital. Not the hospital exactly the second wing. I thought the second wing was closed? There’s a restaurant there, really fancy with…”

“What are you babbling about?”

“The hospital. I bought lunch right here,” she said. “There’s a restaurant. It’s run by the patients. “

A restaurant. Run by patients. If she hadn’t lost her mind there was trouble again. The liver doctor, the gatecrasher. He was responsible. It was a lunatic asylum but sometimes it got even much for a lunatic asylum. “Get your coat,” he barked at her.

“Lets walk,” Louise said.

“Are you crazy,” Mash responded. “We’re in America.” They got in his car drove down to the gate, turned left, went a few feet and turned up the next driveway back to the second wing of the hospital.

“Where is this restaurant?” Mash asked after they pulled up and parked. “There,” Louise said. She pointed to the entrance to the second wing of the hospital.

Mash strode in. There were two lines. Mash ignored them and went up to the man behind the desk with the sign on it that said ‘Reservations.’

“Do you have a reservation?”

“No, I’m Martin Mash I run this hospital.”

“A lot of people say they run the hospital,” the man responded. “Saying you run the hospital or the country or the world is easy. Even believing it is easy. If you don’t have a reservation you’ll have to wait on that line, no matter who you say you are,” he said pointing to the long line of patients and drop in customers. One or two people waved at him. “I want to see the manager,” he said.

“Certainly,” the man said. He made one swift revolution and faced them again. “I am the manager. What can I do for you. If you want to eat without a reservation you have to get on that line. Order is essential,” he said, “especially in a restaurant run by crazy people.”

Martin Mash gave up and got on the line. Crazy people were crazy.

“I want to go to the Boutique,” Louise said after waiting a minute on the line.

“What boutique?”

“They have a boutique here and everything,” she said. “The clothing is super.”

Martin Mash seethed. A restaurant was bad enough. A boutique crossed the line. He wanted to see the boutique. He tapped the man in front of him on the shoulder. “Would you hold my place. I’m going to the bathroom.”

The man in front of him remembered he had to go to the bathroom too. He tapped the man in front of him. “Hold our places will you we have to go to the bathroom.”

“Don’t be too long,” the place holder said, squirming, “I feel the urge coming on too.”

Martin Mash followed his niece to the boutique.

“Look at all of the stuff,” uncle Martin. “It’s really cool. A lot of them are so old they’re new almost.”

Martin Mash looked around. The boutique was very nicely set up. The clothing was creatively displayed. He liked the racks in the cage in the center of the store. The only thing that bothered him was that some of the clothing and furniture looked familiar. He tried to remember just where he had seen it but gave up when he spotted the negligee. It was old fashioned and strangely sexy.

“Would you wear that If I bought it for you?” he asked his niece. “I mean wear it for me,” he said.

She giggled. “I guess I could let you see how it looked on me. I guess so.”

When he reached the cashier and held out the money for the negligee he remembered suddenly that he did not have any brothers and that his niece must be his wife’s brothers daughter. The negligee was sexy. It looked old and somehow familiar.

“Do you want to walk around?” she asked, after he paid for the negligee. “There’s a book store and computer school too. “

“You can look after we eat.” He was getting hungry. “Lets go get back on line.”

When Martin Mash returned to the line he tried to reclaim his old place.

The man behind him complained. “Hey, the back of the line. No cutting in.”

“He’s holding my place Martin,” Mash said.

The man who was complaining tapped the man in front of him on the shoulder. “He says you were holding his place for him.”

“I don’t know him,” the man said.

“I just asked you to hold my place so that I could go to the bathroom.”

“Uh,” the man said suspiciously.

“Where’s the bathroom?” the man behind Mash asked belligerently. He was jumping up and down. “There’s no bathroom here. I looked for it for half an hour.” He tapped the shoulder of the man in front of him. “Did you find the bathroom?”

“There’s no bathroom out here,” the man said. “The bathroom is inside,” he said squirming a little. “Why do think I’m on line?”

Martin Mash dragged Louise to the back of the line. “They might be dangerous,” he said.

When they got into the dining room they were seated at a table for six with four other people who were talking about the ball. A few other people at the single tables were vaguely familiar from the tennis club he belonged to. They had all been at the Crazy Mans Ball too. They nodded at him frostily.

The waiter came promptly and handed menus around. When he handed to menu to Mash he said quietly, “if you want to use the bathroom you have to order something.”

Martin Mash looked at the menu while the waiter fidgeted with his shoelaces.

“Is the duck a la D’Gaulle good?” his niece asked?

“It’s excellent,” the waiter replied.

“O.K.,” she said, “and a coke.”

“I’ll have genuine chicken a la Verms,” Mash ordered.

“I sorry we’re out of genuine chicken Verms. There is imitation chicken a la Verms, but it’s not on the menu. It’s better than the real chicken and we can make it for you if you ordered a day ahead. But without a reservation, I’m really afraid…”

“Never mind,” Mash said “I’ll have what she ordered.”

The meal was superb. “It’s a lot better than yesterday,” his niece said, taking a last pull on her coke.

As the waiter brought the bill he leaned down. “Did you tell the manager you were Martin Mash, the head of Vermeers?”

“The lawyer for the board. My father is head of the board, technically.”

“No matter. The chef would like to say something to you.” The chef walked out of the kitchen and stared at him. “Martin Mash?” he asked.

Mash was uncertain. It was probably a mistake giving his name. There was no help for it now. He would have to trust his authority. “Yes.”

The chef grabbed him and kissed his cheeks. “I want to thank you, we all want to thank you.”

“For what,” Martin Mash asked confused.

“For inviting us to the Crazy Mans Ball. It was a splendid gesture. Dr. Heirath conveyed the invitation to us. We had a wonderful time.” Martin Mash dropped the glass he was holding. The patients in the room applauded softly. “The meal is on the house,” the chef said,”for you and—he looked at Louise—your niece.” The non-patient guests who had been to the ball glowered at him, hissing softly.

“Lets get out of here, Louise,” he grabbed his niece who was turning to let herself be seen by all of the people who were applauding.

“I want to walk around some more,” she said, after they left the restaurant. She tucked the negligee under her arm. “I want to look in the book store.”

“Why? Oh never mind. I’m going back to the office. You’ll have to walk. Don’t take to long there may be work to do.”

“Oh uncle Martin,” she giggled.

When he got back to his office, he called the liver man.

“This is Mash.”

“Mash. Good I been trying to get you. What’s up?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” the lawyer said, holding his anger reserve.

“I’ve used up all of the money in the account. I’m waiting for the board to transfer more money. The situation is getting desperate.”

“The board is working on it.”

“A cash flow problem?” the doctor asked.

“Screw the money,” Mash said steely. “What about the restaurant?”

“Restaurant?”

“You slimy gate crasher,” he screamed. “There’s a restaurant in the second wing of the hospital. This is a lunatic asylum not a mall.”

“Since there was no money coming from the foundation the patients have started some business temporarily to make money.”

The gall of the man was unbelievable. “They can’t do that.”

“They can,” the liver man said, “and they did. How did you like the food?”

Mash hung up. The insulting prick. He would fix that. He dialed his paralegal.

“Tiny. Can the patients start businesses?”

“What?”

“Can the patients at Vermeers start businesses?”

“Yes,” Tiny said.

“How do you know?” Mash wanted to know.

Tiny hesitated. “I checked the charter of the foundation.”

“What do you mean you checked? I just found out about it.”

Tiny hesitated again. He wasn’t quite ready yet to tell Mash to take the paralegal job and shove.

“When I checked out the competitors, the Japanese. I went through the charter and bylaws. The patients can start businesses.”

“What kind of businesses?”

“Any kind of businesses. The proviso in the bylaws was obviously put in to allow the patients to sell knitted potty pants and jamies they made in workshops to raise money for treats. But the way it’s worded they can start any business. Your father probably wrote it. It was an oversight not specifying…”

Mash slammed the phone down. Shit legal help. Damn. He sat at his desk steaming. The gatecrasher was a cunning, sneaky shit. Two could play that game. Mash thought that he had been as decent as you could be. He had tried to screw them gracefully, on the up and up, find other institutions that would take those with insurance, cure those who could be cured with a swirl of the pen, send the others out with pills to the half way house of the real world. No more mister nice guy. He racked his brain to think of what he could do to make trouble. There had to be something he could do. The hospital was always on the brink of being closed down, now when he needed to figure a way of permanently shutting the doors it seemed impossible. He forced himself to think of why it was always on the brink of being closed down beside the fact that he was using most of the money of the foundation to manipulate the art market.

He heard Louise come in then the sound of things falling. He opened the door. The floor of in front of her desk was covered with books. “They have a wonderful book shop uncle Martin. I bought a lot of things.” He picked up one of the volumes that lay on the floor. ‘Pre-remembering; the key to fruitful forgetting.’

“That’s a very interesting book,” she said. “They had a lot of them, very cheap. It says you can remember a lot of things you don’t remember you forgot, like your family tree, and other lives, and when you were two.”

He tossed the book back on the pile on the floor. Martin Mash had no desire to remember when he was two. The only thing I need to remember he said to himself is why the hospital was always on the brink of closing. “Do you have the negligee?” he asked.

“Oh yes uncle Martin,” she giggled. “I was thinking I would work on it a little, before I tried it on for you. Streamline it a little. What do you think?”

“That’s a fine idea,” he said, distracted by the piece of information that eluded him.

“Oh. uncle Martin,” Louise said. “Did you open your mail today? It may be important. There’s a letter from that government agency that is always threatening to close the hospital—because of the forms.”

He remembered. It was the schizophrenic government. The two agencies in the department of Health and Social Services that had jurisdiction over the hospital had warred over Vermeers for years. One of the agencies was trying to shut them down, but it was locked in a profound conflict with another agency that was trying to declare them a model institution and give them an award. The Lunatic Asylum Regulatory Agency had been looking for a way to shut them down for years. Forms. They found fault with the way Louise had filled out the forms. There was always something omitted, a line incorrectly filled out, a date missing.

The other agency, the Mental Health Regulatory Agency, had been lobbying for just as long to award the Mental Health facility of the year award to Vermeers because no one had lodged a malpractice lawsuit against it as patients had against almost all of the other crazy houses in the state. It was, in their opinion, close to a model lunatic asylum and were lobbying hard to get it recognized it as such.

But now he had what the agency that was trying to shut them down wanted all along. An iron clad excuse to weld the doors closed permanently.

Irregularities. They lived on irregularities They sent a stream of letters criticizing Vermeers for a form not filled out right. His niece hadn’t been able to fill out a form worth shit. Perhaps the gatecrashing liver man had neglected to fill them out entirely. They were always calling threatening to close the place down. They may have already made that decision.

He went to his desk and ripped open the letter.

“Dear Mr. Mash. This is formal notification, required by sections 4a and 4b of the uniform code, of this bureau’s intention to close the hospital within seven (7) days if there is not an immediate improvement in the way in which the forms required by our agency are filled out. Signed….”,

Wonderful. It was dated last week. He picked up the letter and called the signature. “I want to speak to Mr. Bernard Smalze. Martin Mash, from Vermeers calling,” he said.

“Mash,” the voice that broke the silence said.

“Yes. Look Smalze, about the forms and the closing of the hospital…”

“Yeah,” the man said. “I meant to call you about that. You’ve certainly got your act together I’ve never seen forms filled out better. Forget the letter. I’m sending you a certificate instead.”

“Certificate?”

“Of merit, your forms were the best of any lunatic asylum in the country. Splendid. Ignore the letter. Sorry,” and hung up.

Mash bit his lip. “Shit.”

What about the other agency, the one that was trying to give them an award and make them a demonstration project. He racked his brain. If they knew the staff had quit they would be ticked off. Maybe they would be pissed enough to flip the way the other agency flopped.

He picked up the phone again and dialed the other bureaucracy.

“Lunatic Asylums Regulatory Agency. Ms. Diamond.”

He rummaged around on his desk until he found the letter informing them the agency was working to make them a demonstration project.

“Let me speak to Harold Glick,” he said disguising his voice.

“Are you a mental patient currently in a hospital?” she asked sweetly.

“Get me Glick,” Mash screamed in his normal voice.

“Just a moment.”

The voice changed. “Glick here. “

Mash assumed his disguised voice.

“Vermeers doesn’t have a staff. Very irregular.”

“Who is this?”

“A friend.”

“Vermeers is one of the best lunatic asylums around,” Glick said.

“Very irregular. No staff at all,” Mash hissed into the phone. “And they have the patients working as help in a restaurant.”

“Are you a mental patient there?” the voice asked.

Mash could not control himself. “You schmuck, they’re exploiting the patients, they have no staff and they’ve opened businesses.” He slammed the phone down. That should do it. At the least they would send a man around to look. They might close them down and he would not have to do anything at all. Then the government would be saddled with relocating the patients. He was a genius. It might make even up for fiasco of the Crazy Man’s Ball.

He deserved a reward. He yelled out to his niece. “How does the negligee look?”

“Not yet,” uncle Martin, she said, “not quite yet.”

~~

When Dr. Heirath got the call from the lunatic asylum supervisory council he fled to Strayte yelling incoherently.

“Shit,” he said. “We’ve had it.” He was holding his side just above his liver.

Strayte refused to get excited. “What’s wrong?”

“We’ve had it, just when things were beginning to look up.”

“Slow down. What is it?” Strayte asked. He was reading a book he had bought at the book store.

“The government. I told you.”

“The government what, I told you?” Strayte repeated. “What does that mean?

Heirath calmed down a little.

“We’re going to be inspected.”

“Who,” Strayte asked, “is going to inspect us?”

The doctor caught his breath. “The government, the government.”

“All of the government or just part of it?”

“The part of that deals with lunatics,” Heirath said. “Do you have anything to drink?”

“No, it’s not good for your liver remember.”

“The hell with my liver, my liver doesn’t matter anyway. They got an anonymous call that we were running the hospital without staff. It was probably that bastard Mash. They are sending someone around to check.”

“When?” Strayte asked.

“Day after tomorrow, but what differences does when make. We haven’t got a staff today and we certainly aren’t going to get one by the day after tomorrow.”

“We do have a staff,” Strayte insisted.”

“They’re patients.”

“Some of the time they’re patients other times they’re staff, what’s wrong with that. It a very modern management technique. Break down the lines between management and workers, reach out to clients and bring them into the organization. Shrink the hierarchy to nothing at all. Very modern thinking. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it. I was thinking of writing an article about it for a…”

Heirath interrupted him. “Have you been talking to Superman again?”

“No,” Strayte said, “why?”

“Because it’s crazy. Here at Vermeers there is no difference between staff and patients. In every other lunatic asylum in the world it’s the only difference that makes a difference. Patients are patients staff is staff. For the government there’s a difference, believe me. We’re done for.”

“We don’t need staff,” Strayte insisted, “we need patients. We have a staff. In fact we’re staff heavy. Almost all of the patients are doing duty as staff. There are fourteen members of the recreational staff and there’s no one to do exercises. They have to take turns pretending to be patients. There are five art therapists and no one to fingerpaint. There are seven people doing social work and no clients. We don’t need staff we need patients.”

“You’re out of your mind,” the acting administrator said. “They will close us down tomorrow. Then it will be their responsibility to place the patients and Mash and Triff will be home free. It’s a disaster.”

“Did you realize the boutique is starting to wholesale clothing and furniture?” Strayte said. “They figure at least three years supply at wholesale prices. They’ve been contacted by a Korean firm who wants to reproduce some of the items as long and they can use the logo.”

“What logo?” the doctor wanted to know.

“The new hospital logo. Look I’ll tell you later. I think I can get us some patients.”

“We need staff,” the doctor wailed.

“What do you know. Theory,” he snorted. “You’re an acting administrator. You make policy,” Strayte said. “What do you know of the trenches? Patients,” he repeated as he picked up the phone and dialed a number.

“Manny.”

“Nick.”

“Yes.

“Where are you? What the hell is happening? Things are wild here. They’ve scheduled hearings on the sexual harassment charges two weeks from tomorrow, with you or without you.”

“Manny, are you still teaching that course in the Sociology of Mental Illness?”

“Yeah. It’s a monster, 123 students not counting the auditors. I don’t understand what’s so interesting about…”

“It’s just that you’re such a great teacher. Manny, I have a treat for your students. How would you like to take them on a field trip to a real nut house?”

“Great Nick. I’ve been trying to schedule one at CTTL next month but…”

“CTTL is not a real nut house, Manny. It’s an insurance mill. I’ve got a genuine nut house experience. There’s only one problem. It has to be day after tomorrow.”

Manny thought about it. “No problem. I meet them today. I’ll tell them next class is a field trip. They’ll love the excuse for cutting out of school for the day. What’s going on Nick? They’re really going to put you through the ringer. They’ll be nothing left of you when Grundle is done. Are you going to show up for the hearings? The chairman is pissed because he’s had to handle your classes and they are bitching and he’s been trying to get an adjunct to take them over but he can’t find anyone. No one has heard anything from you for weeks.”

“It’s to complicated to explain. Look Manny I’ll tell you when you get here. Its Vermeers.”

“Shit Nick, it’s in the lunatic mode. I mean CTTL is a modern facility. Last time I took a class to Vermeers the patients pissed on…”

“It’s different now,” Strayte insisted. “I guarantee it’s different, word of honor, one sociologist to another.” He leaned over to the doctor who was sitting in a state of shock listening to the conversation.

“What time is the visit scheduled for?”

“11 a.m.”

“Manny can you be here with the class at 9 a.m. Our ward nurse will give them an orientation.”

“No problem, Nick.”

“I’ll see you then,” Strayte said and hung up.

“See,” he turned to Heirath, “patients. It’s all set.”

“What’s all set?”

“Patients. Nothing to worry about. Everything is all set. Only one thing. Call the restaurant. Tell the chef not to take any reservations for day after tomorrow. Tell him we’ll have special guests for lunch.”

“Who?” the acting administrator asked.

“The patients of course.”

“You’re crazy too,” Heirath said as he walked out.

“Trust me,” Strayte said encouragingly. “But I’ll need a pair of hospital whites again,” Strayte yelled after him.

~~

When Dr. Mannfred Srincy came with the bus load of students Strayte met them at the door and took them to the auditorium. Most of the patients who were staff were sitting in chairs on the stage. Nurse G sat in a chair beside Dr. Heirath. Strayte was dressed in hospital whites.

“I’m Dr. Nicholas Strayte. I’m the acting assistant administrator of the hospital,” he said. “This is Dr. Heirath who is the acting administrator and acting chief medical officer and acting chief psychiatrist of Vermeers. Next to him is our chief ward Nurse, Nurse G who is responsible among other things for order in the hospital. And this is our staff” he said pointing to most of the patients who were sitting on the stage. The people on the stage stood up and bowed slightly.

“You’re in for a real treat today. You’ve read Goffman and Sheff and some of you have even read Laing and Foucalt. But reading is one thing he said, and experiencing is another. Today, We want to give you the experience of what it feels like to be a patient in a lunatic asylum.” The people on the stage applauded softly. “I assure you there is no danger. At the end of the experience we’ll take you to a special lunch and the bus will take you back to the college.”

“Is this experience going to be on the final exam, Dr. Srincy,” one of the students asked.

Strayte spoke up. “For the next class each of you will write up your experience. No more than two pages. Dr. Srincy will count that towards your final grade,” he said. Manny sat in the corner holding his head. “Absolutely.” he repeated, “absolutely.”

Another student raised her hand. “Double spaced or single spaced?” she asked.

“Single spaced,” Strayte said.

The students moaned.

“O.K., double spaced,” Strayte corrected himself. “The important thing is that you throw yourself into the role of patient and write up what you have experienced honestly. After we break up here the staff will fill you in on what kind of illnesses you might have and how you might behave to show that you are crazy. You have to listen to them and follow as much of what they say as exactly as you can, even if it sounds crazy. They have a lot of experience with crazy people and if you listen you might learn something.”

A hand went up.

“When do we hand in the two double spaced pages?”

“First class next week,” Strayte said. “The important thing is that you let yourself feel the experience of being crazy. Do you have any questions?”

“What time is lunch?” a heavy student in the front row asked.

“One o’clock, if you recover. Now Nurse G who is head of the ward staff here will spend a little time talking about maintaining order. If there is time after she finishes Dr. Heirath will tell you about the diagnostic categories of crazy we use in the hospital. Nurse G,” Strayte announced.

The students and the staff gave her a loud round of applause.

“I want to talk to you about maintaining order,” Nurse G began. “Order is most important in a mental hospital. I mean if there’s no order in a mental hospital where can you expect it and if you can’t expect it when people are insane when can you expect it.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” a student said.

“Well I’m glad you are paying attention,” Nurse G said. “But you have to remember this is a mad house, and logic doesn’t count for shit. Above all this is a mad house,” she repeated. “What I said is true, take my word for it.”

Strayte and Dr. Heirath slipped down from the stage as Nurse G began her lecture.

“What the hell is going on Nick?” Dr. Scrincy asked.

Strayte tried to bring him up to date, skipping the hairiest parts.

“It’s crazy Nick. “

“Yes, it is a lunatic asylum remember.”

Nick Strayte went back to his office to wait for Dr. Heirath who said he would show up with the government regulator. He did not have to wait long. Twenty minutes later a sweating Dr. Heirath showed up with a short, balding, nervous man with an enormous briefcase.

“The government takes this very seriously,” the man said pumping out beads of sweat.

“So do we,” Dr. Strayte said.

“It’s a very serious charge. “

“What is?” Strayte asked,

“Not having a staff. “

“Very serious,” Strayte repeated. “It’s probably the most serious charge that anyone could lodge against a mental hospital.” Strayte drew his face together and looked serious. “You could get away with not having patients for a while I guess but you wouldn’t last a day without staff. It’s silly though if you think about it. I mean how could a lunatic asylum get along without a staff.”

“Could we get on with it,” the man said. “Being around crazy people makes me nervous.”

“Of course. Would you like to conduct the tour?” Strayte asked the acting administrator.

“No,” Heirath said, stepping back, “this is your show. You’re acting assistant administrator in charge of staff. You do it. I’ll meet you in front when it’s over. I have policy to make,” and hurried out.

“O.K.,” Strayte said “this way. Is there anything you’d like to see first”?

“Most of the hospitals have trouble with recreational staff. Take me to your recreational facilities,” the man swinging the briefcase said.

Strayte tried to remember where the recreation room was. “We try to build a little recreational activity into all of the patient activities in the hospital, he said. He turned into the weight room. “Here is the weight room,” he said. “Not interesting, I’m afraid. Suppose we…”

“No. I want to see the weight room,” the government agent said.

“In for a penny in for a pound,” Strayte said.

“In for a yen in for ruble,” someone with a t shirt that read staff said as she went by.

The weight room was filled with students running around jumping on scales.

“Try to find one that’s right for you,” Frank Hymut was telling them. “These are delicate instruments be careful.” One of the students was trying to fit himself onto a small balance used for weighing doses of medicine.

“I don’t think that will do,” Frank said, gently lifting the student off of the small platform. “Try that one next to those people.” Five female college students were balancing themselves on a bathroom scale. “If we divide by five that comes to 11 pounds. Just right,” one of them shouted, “exactly.”

“They’ve been dieting,” Frank Hymut said cheerfully. “It gives them a goal.”

“How much does 4824 avoirdupois ounces come to in pounds?” one of the patients yelled.

“Fat,” said another, “fat, fat, fat.”

“Lets not be so critical,” Frank Hymut said. “Fat mad people have feelings too.”

“I think we’d better be moving on.” Strayte nudged the man with the briefcase.

“What is this?” the man said pointing with his briefcase to the library.

“It’s the library,” Strayte said. “Usually very…”

“Is it safe?”

“Very safe,” Strayte said, “only…”I want to see it,” the man said, breaking into a twitch.

They pushed open the door of the library.

A group of patients were sitting on the floor while one of the staff read from a book.

“Then Little Red Riding Hood knocked on the door of her grandmother’s cottage.”

One of the group on the floor spoke up.

“I hate this part. It’s the part where he eats her doesn’t he?”

“Well traditionally that’s what happened, but of course we don’t have to do it the usual way do we.”

“No,” the patients shouted.

“What would you like to happen?”

“She could eat him. He could turn out to be a wolf only in a metaphoric sense and she could eat…”

“Well that’s one ending, sort of,” the staff person said. “Anyone else have any ideas.”

“She could distract him.”

“Distract him, how?”

“Well she could show him the video game she had just gotten from the fairy godmother and they could live ever after playing video games.”

“Hm,” the staff person said. That’s not…”

“We could change the channel,” another student said.

“Well lets see how this story really ends,” the staff person said picking up the book again. “When Little Red Riding Hood entered the room, the wolf who was taking the grandmothers place on the bed said to her, “Are you into bondage?”

“I don’t remember that,” the government inspector said.

Strayte tugged on the inspector’s sleeve. “The patents love reading and stories,” Strayte said suddenly remembering where the recreation room was. “Let me show you our rec room.”

In the recreation room a few of the staff was sitting around watching Donnahue on Television. Next to them Mr. Chameleon was leading students in a duplicate of the show. “Today,” he said our topic is,” he leaned over the TV to see if he couldn’t catch what Donnahue’s topic was for today.

“Guilt, what I feel guilty about. What do you feel guilty about?” Mr. Chameleon’s Donnahue asked.

One of the patients waved her hand.

“I feel guilty about the riots.”

“Did you take part in the riots?” Mr. Chameleon’s Donnahue asked.

“No, I just feel guilty about them. And the starvation and the needless deaths.”

“Well does that make you feel better?”.

“No I feel awful. Also, I lied about the dog eating my homework.”

“I see.”

“What would make you feel better?”

“If I had to stand in the corner.”

“Go stand in the corner,” Donnahue said.

“I feel better already except about what I’m going to do tomorrow.”

“What are you going to do tomorrow?” Donnahue asked.

“I don’t know but I feel guilty about it already.”

“Don’t do it,” all the other patients yelled.

“I can’t help it,” the patient in the corner cried. “Anyway if I feel guilty about it I’ve suffered enough so what’s the point in not doing it.”

“They are crazy, aren’t they,” the government inspector said, turning his attention to the other members of the staff who were watching television.

“Are they staff?”

“Yes, they’re taking a break. They’re vigilant though. If there was trouble they would jump right in.”

“I can see that,” the man with the briefcase said. “They must be experienced people.”

“Yes,” Strayte said, “very experienced. Want to see more?”

“A little,” the small man said, relaxing a little. “What about the violent patients?”

“We don’t really have any really violent patients.”

“I like to see the staff that deals with violent patients.”

“Well, lets see what we can find,” Strayte said, striking out through the maze trying to find the way back to the ward.

“Wouldn’t you rather see patients doing occupational therapy.”

“No,” said the little man. “Violence, violent patients.”

From the room where the painter works there was a caterwauling. “That sounds like violent patients,” the government man said and headed in that direction.

“Wait,” Strayte called after him.

He followed the briefcase into the studio where the artist was in front of an easel trying to paint three student patients wrapped in straight jackets. They were rolling around and screaming. When they stopped the dealer stroked their heads gently.

“Shush,” he said. “Be still, otherwise you’ll come out a blur, only a blur.”

“Were not patients,” the people in the straight jackets yelled when they saw Strayte with the government inspector. They appealed to Strayte. “Dr. Strayte, tell them we’re students not patients. He is painting us.” The only part of the picture on the canvas that was intelligible was the outline of straight jacket. They appealed to the briefcase. “We’re not really patients, we’re students. This is a sociology class. Help us. Help us,” they repeated. “I’ve experienced enough madness,” one of the quieter students who had given up struggling said. “I want to go home.”

“Don’t we all,” the man with the briefcase said, turning on his heels and striding out.

“A waste of government money,” he mumbled. “Sorry to have bothered you,” he said to Strayte as he headed for the ward. Strayte followed behind hoping the man would remember how to get out. When they could see the ward Strayte caught up to him.

“I hate these anonymous calls,” the government inspector said. “You have a fine staff, Dr. Strayte. They seem like experienced caring human beings as well. I’ll file my report in the morning.”

He extended his hand to Heirath who was waiting at the door of the wing. “Absolutely nothing to worry about. Sorry to have bothered you. This is one of the best run institutions I’ve seen. Your staff is top notch,” he said.

“Would you like to have lunch,” Strayte asked the man as he walked to his car.

“No thank you. I think I would like to get back to my office.” He got in the car and sped away.

“I told you,”Strayte said, nudging the acting administrator, “a piece of cake.”

He went into the hospital. “Class is over,” he shouted at the students who Dr. Scrincy had collected. “Lunch time.”

Chapter 27

The great law of human nature is: if you can catch it, you can eat it

For the first time since he went insane and failed at flying Nick Strayte felt really good. He had helped. He had done something useful. He had saved Heirath’s buns and the hospital’s buns and his own buns. He decided to go to the acting administrators office and collect his reward.

When Strayte came into doctors office the doctor was crossing and recrossing the room. His motions were somewhere between pacing and prancing. With his hand pressed gently on his liver he looked like Napoleon askew.

“What are you doing?”

“What do you mean what am I doing? I’m pacing. I’m pacing and holding my liver. Can’t you recognize pacing when you see it? Chinese,” he said.

“What’s wrong?” Strayte asked. “As far as I can see things are going splendidly crazy. I came here to be praised for the acuteness of my analysis, my good judgment…”

“You’re right, the students were a good idea.” Heirath said admiringly.

“A good idea,” Strayte said. “A great idea, a stupendous idea, a…”

“Hold on,” Heirath said, “don’t get carried away. Praise for winning a battle comes after the war—if you win. If you loose the war you’re a dongle in a sea of putzes.”

“What are you talking about?” Strayte asked. It dawned on him suddenly that he was used to an academic environment where problems arose and matured at the glacial pace of a species evolving not at the precipitate nanosecond speed of lunacy in real time. “What’s this about the Chinese?”

“We whupped the government. Now the Chinese are coming. In a few days we’re going to be up to our armpits in Mongols: the barbarians are at the gates and you think things are going splendidly and want to be congratulated for a brilliant idea.”

“Chinese?” Strayte said. “There are the two Japanese lunatics but there are no Chinese patients in Vermeers.”

“Not patients, doctors psychiatrists.” He turned to the map where the snaking lines of flags coiled in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

“It’s a nice map,” Strayte said condescendingly. “A very very pretty map.” It was a map of the world. A corrugated line of green and purple flags described a torturous path through India, circumnavigated SE Asia and was poised to leap into china. “But what the hell does it have to do with…?”

“I was hoping I could figure out the pattern,” the doctor said.

“What pattern?”

“The pattern of the flags. I know there’s a pattern. It’s probably very simple. The administrator…”

“You’re the administrator.”

Dr. Heirath collapsed into the chair by the desk. “I’m acting administrator. The man I’m filling in for is leisurely wandering around visiting mental hospitals and attending psychiatric conventions. He’s been doing it for two years. Started the day after I got here. He sends a letter to keep track of where he’s going, or where he’s been. I m not sure. Green flags mean he’s visiting a place.”

“Who gives a shit,” Strayte says, “it means he’s not here. You still have…”

“Wait,” the acting administrator said. “The purple flags mean that he’s invited a delegation from that place to come to visit Vermeers. If I could have figured out the pattern of flags I could have taken a vacation and left you to deal with them.”

“It’s a Fibonacci series only the values seem to never make it past the 6th term or. I see. Every country begins the series again. Simple.”

The doctor shrugged off the information. “What the hell is a Fibonacci series? Wait. Never mind. Its useless information now. These visiting delegations are hell. They produce a constant stream of psychiatric questions then they want to know about shopping and sightseeing. The linguist helps. After a few days they only talk to him except when they want to know where you have relatives.”

“Relatives?”

“So they have a cheap place to stay for a night. A purple flag in China means Chinese.”

“Any flag in China means Chinese. The Chinese flag is Red with a gold star. But there is no flag in China,” Strayte said.

The doctor retrieved the letter from his desk and removed the miniature purple flag it held.

He handed to letter to Strayte. “I don’t have my glasses. Where is the letter postmarked.”

“Kunming, Yunnan, China.”

He took the purple flag and pinned it on the map.

“Chinese,” he said. “The only consolation is that Mash got one of these letters today too. The visitors bug him more than they do me. They go to him first. They fill his office with odd costumes they sit at his desk, try his buzzers, they ask him legal questions. Then they come here. It’s a disaster. especially now. Would you tell the linguist…”

Strayte interrupted him. “Who is this linguist?”

“A patient, Arthur Brion. He’s a linguist. He’s working in the restaurant as maitre d’. When you see him tell him that he better brush up on Chinese dialects, from,” he picked up the letter again, holding it close to his face, “Yunnan.” He collapsed in his chair and refused to say anything.

“I’m leaving, Strayte said, “I’ll come back when you have recovered, maybe after breakfast.”

“Breakfast,” the doctor yelled after him as if somewhere in breakfast there might be the possibility of forgetting. “Maybe they’ll have truffle pancakes. Wait,” he yelled after Strayte. “I’m coming.”

~~

Mash was upbeat. He had wrapped the whole ball of wax up.

He scanned the mail on his desk. There were two letters. One was from the administrator. It had colorful stamps on it and it was postmarked China. The administrator had reached China. It meant that sometime there would be visits from Chinese administrators and Han psychiatrists.

The other was from the Government hospital regulatory agency with the good news. It was obvious what would be in the letter. The government inspectors had come. They had seen that there was no staff. They had come down hard on the gatecrasher and the hospital. The letter was to inform him that the hospital was to be closed immediately. Mash chuckled. He was off the hook. The government would bear the burden of getting rid of the patients.

“Good news first,” he thought. He picked up the letter from the Government hospital regulatory agency that had come special delivery. After he was certain the government was going to close the hospital he could take whatever bad news might be in the administrator’s letter, even the worst.

The specter of visits by wave after wave of Chinese did not bother him because if the good news was even moderately good and the government not completely inept, Vermeers would be closed before the first wave of Chinese hit. Then Triff and his computer could entertain all of Cathay as far as he was concerned. Perhaps the Chinese would be interested in a franchise. Lots of luck.

He had a warm feeling. the taste of success coated his mouth. He yelled to his niece, “Louise, how is the negligee coming?”

“Not quite ready yet, uncle Martin.”

He forced his finger under the flap of the envelop and slid it slowly to liberate the letter’s contents. He wanted to savor the taste of victory slowly. He aligned the moment with the humiliation of the fiasco of the Crazy Man’s Ball so they would cancel one another out.

“Dear Mr. Mash. We want to take this opportunity to apologize for the visit our inspector made to your hospital on Thursday last. We received an anonymous tip that your hospital was working without proper staff. Our inspector reports however that not only was there adequate staff but their performance was outstanding. We are recommending you for the lunatic of the year award given to the hospital that shows greatest respect and care for its patients. Yours truly…” Mash tore the letter up in a fury.

It was diabolical. Outrageous. It was incompetent government personified. He would complain. He would anonymously call his representative and complain about the inefficiency of the Hospital regulatory agency. He would telegraph his senator about the graft and corruption that he was certain explained the betrayal.

It was another disaster.

He tore open the letter from the administrator. A purple flag fluttered to the floor. He retrieved the flag and shoved it in his desk. He did not have to read the letter. A delegation of Chinese psychiatrists were coming to visit. There was no date although the letter was three weeks old. He had written the administrator a dozen times telling him not to send visiting delegations of psychiatrists to Vermeers but the administrator never acknowledged receiving the telegrams.

He wondered how the international mails could be so one sided. The administrator’s letters always reached him. It was the gate crasher’s fault. He tried to clear his mind. Now that the government refused to close the hospital there was only one thing that he had to worry about and that was finding a place to dump the patients or enough of them that the others could be discharged as cured. Then he could arrange the sale of the hospital to the three competitors and retire on the money he would make from Triff’s scheme.

He would have to start again. He had to get the patients placed before the deal could go through. That was the only thing he had to worry about. He picked up the phone trying to think who he could call first. Perhaps the state institution would take them. Screw CTTL. He would throw in the insured ones with the others, a package deal. Maybe that would make it palatable. The state had an obligation to take them anyhow. How could they refuse? He had just started dialing the number of the state hospital for the insane when Louise came through the door. “Uncle Martin.”

She was not wearing the negligee he could see that. He didn’t have to pay attention to her, not now. He turned back to the phone. “What is it Louise, can’t you see I’m making a phone call.”

“There are a million Chinese out here,” she said in a panic. “They say they are here from the administrator, to see the hospital.”

A swarm of fifteen Chinese swirled and eddied as they flowed past Louise into his room.

“Gentleman,” Mash said, “I am overjoyed to welcome you to Vermeers but you…”

A stream of Chinese came from the two Chinese Doctors with stethoscopes in their ears followed by a stream of English from someone in the back of the room.

“I am little Wong,” the translator’s voice announced from the back, “I am big Wong,” he said changing his voice so that the statements were clearly meant to come from different people. “We are very happy to fulfil the request of the administrator and come to visit your hospital for the insane. We are from Yunnan. When is Lunch?”

“Lunch!” It was outrageous. He would have to treat this squadron of loony tunes doctors to lunch. They would ask him a million questions about the operation of a mental hospital of which he knew nothing. On the other hand lunch could give him a little time to think about what to do with them. “Lunch is now,” Martin Mash said.

“Louise,” he yelled.

“It’s almost ready uncle Martin. Not yet though.”

“No, Louise. Forget the negligee,” he screamed—“for the time being. I’m taking the Chinese to lunch.”

“Where?” Louise wanted to know.

Mash tried to think. “Next door. Call and try to make a reservation for sixteen.” They wanted to see a lunatic asylum. They would see a lunatic asylum.

“We have van,” Little Wong said in choppy English. The translator who had made his way to the front of the crowd translated the choppy English to choppier English: “A van to hold us waiting possessed.”

“It’s not far,” he assured the Wongs as they and the translator eschewed the van for the back seat of his Mercedes. “Not far,” he assured them as he drove down the driveway hung a left and pulled back up the driveway fifty feet down the road to the second wing of Vermeers. “Here we are.”

“Very convenient,” said the three Chinese who waved to their colleagues fifty feet away, all of whom were fighting to get into the van at the same time.

Mash led the congregation of milling psychiatrists to the restaurant and went up to the reservations counter. “Mash,” he said, “I have a reservation, for sixteen.”

“I’m sorry sir,” the man said politely. “There is no reservation under that name.”

“You’re sure. My secretary must have just called.”

“No sir, absolutely not.”

“I was here yesterday,” he said. “I’m the head of the hospital.” He remembered the cooks warm greeting.

The man handling reservations tilted his head and lectured Mash with a straight face. “A lot of people believe they run the hospital. Even more people believe they run the world. Believing that you are master of the universe is easy. But I’m afraid it makes no difference at all. Master of the universe or not, if you do not have a reservation you wait on that line.” He pointed to the winding line of patients.

Mash gave up. He led the band of Chinese to the end of the line. “It won’t take long,” he said. The Chinese at the very back of the line yelled something to the translator.

“They want to know if they can walk around and look,” the translator said to Mash.

“Look at what,” Mash asked.

“At things. There seem to be other stores in the building.”

“Of course,” Mash acquiesced, “it’s a free country.” The entire group of Chinese including the Wongs and the translator wandered off leaving Mash to wait alone.

By the time he finally reached the entrance to the restaurant only half of the Chinese had returned. They were loaded up with dresses and suits from the boutique and books from the bookstore. “Where are the others?” Mash wanted to know. “We’re about to be seated.”

“Oh, some are answering phones, most learning how to use computer.”

“Go get them,” Mash demanded, “otherwise we’ll have to get on the end of the line again.” Little Wong scurried to retrieve his errant colleagues.

“Very interesting,” the translator translated for himself as he rejoined the Wongs who were standing next to Mash. He was rubbing and blowing on his fingers. “Very efficient system for learning computer, very Chinese.”

The sixteen Chinese psychiatrists milled around and struggled to find a seat. “What’s for eating,” Big Wong said, looking at the menu. “One from page one and one from page two,” Little Wong said, “all way round.”

Lunch was noisy as the Chinese concentrated on eating and devoured everything on the table making wild slurping shooshing sounds. Mash was grateful that there was little time for conversation. When the first course was over the Wongs huddled close to him. They brought out a small bottle of white liquor. “This is for our honored host,” they said and poured him a glass full of the liquor. “Gambay,” they shouted. The liquid had an instantaneous effect. No one noticed Mr. Chameleon inconspicuously pull up a chair and take a place at the table. He was not hungry at all but he hadn’t been Chinese for a long time and the opportunity to be a variety of different Chinese intrigued him.

“Our lunatic asylums are quite different from yours,” Big Wong said, casually. “We have to send out for food. Of course the government pays so perhaps it is not so different. And of course there are the patients.”

Mash nodded. Patients.

“Of course not so bothersome in China. They only say wrong things.”

“Same here,” Mash said, “our patients can’t think straight.”

“In China too,” Big Wong said. “Bitch, complain. Politics, politics, politics. Crazy talk continually.”

“What do you mean politics?” Mash asked.

“Oh Little Wong said. “Oh, in China lunatic asylums keep those who are most crazy, those who are irrational, say the wrong things. In China only politically crazy in lunatic asylums.”

“What about the schizophrenics and the obsessives?”

“Oh those other crazies we send to prison. Prison is to good for the politically crazy. They do not deserve prisons. Too good for them,” Big Wong repeated. “Now our lunatic asylums. Work, work, work. Work makes the crazy well.”

“What can I show you here?” Mash asked, a little tipsy already from the white lightening.

“No time now to see anything but lunch today,” Big Wong confided. “We want to shop. We have meeting in NYC tonight. Shopping, buying, business. New china. Really new. Business is in, politics is out. We make business in New York tonight.”

“What kind of business?” Mash asked.

“Business,” Big Wong said ambiguously. “Have an order for coats, television sets and watches.”

“But none of these things are made in America,” Mash protested, “most of the are imported from China.”

“Cheaper here than in China, even coats made in China cheaper here than in China. Quality better too. Quality control for export very strict. Very strict,” the translator said. “Quality control for in country not so good.” He held out the ear piece of his stethoscope for Mash to see. It was held to the throat of the instrument with scotch tape. “We are also buying helicopters made here, some automatic weapons and computers.”

“But you are psychiatrists,” Mash said.

“Yes but in China today everyone is a businessman. Making money is most important thing. Politics is out, economics is in.”

“It’s a shame you’re not in the market for mental patients,” Mash said drunkenly. “I’d have a deal for you then.”

The Chinese looked up slowly. He had become instantly alert. “What kind of deal?”

“Well you could take a planeload of patients from Vermeers, put them on a plane and take them to your lunatic asylum in Yunnan. Since things are cheaper in China you could keep them much more cheaply than we could keep them here. Vermeers would pay you a reasonable rate and…”

The psychiatrist took out a calculator. “How many patients for instance?”

“Oh, we have about eighty.” It was a rough approximation give or take a dozen.

“Twenty eight dollars is the break-even point,” Big Wong said.

“What?” Mash said sleepily.

“Twenty-eight dollars a month. After twenty-eight dollars we make money, real money.”

“What are you talking?” about Mash wanted to know.

“You are creative business genius, Mash, a friend to Chinese psychiatric profession. We never thought of it. Americans crazy but very creative.” He started talking to Little Wong in rapid Yunnan dialect. The translator translated lazily to Mash. “We could contract care of crazy people. Chinese very efficient, rice very cheap.”

A calculator materialized before each psychiatrist at the table.

“Who would pay, the patient, the insurance company, or the government?” someone at the end of the table yelled in perfect English.

“Well,” said Mash, flushing out his tipsiness with the prospect of being able to solve his problem, “the hospital board would collect American rates from the insurance companies and the state and the federal government and in Vermeers case, the charitable foundation that runs the hospital. We would pay you top Chinese rates. Even with generous slippage everyone would save money and make a fortune.”

“No trouble from Chinese end,” Big Wong said.

Mash was beginning to see the light from a Chinese lantern at the end of the tunnel.

“You mean,” he said just to get things clear in his head,” that we could send a planeload of crazies to you and you would keep them in a Chinese psychiatric hospital for 28 dollars a month. How long?”

“As long as the payments continued,” the Chinese psychiatrist said. “If payment stops, they come back, postpaid.”

“What about the government?”

“Oh Chinese very pragmatic. The twenty-eight includes certain payments to officials. In the beginning we could take them in under diplomatic passports,” one of the other Chinese psychiatrists said. “That would make it twenty-nine a month,” Big Wong added, “but we could do it next week.”

“Can you handle eighty?” Mash asked.

“Sure,” Big Wong said, in perfect English. “We can handle as many as you can send once we ramp up, but now eighty would be child’s play.”

The Chinese were a gift from the Gods, Mash thought. They were serious. He would have to check the hospital charter but he was absolutely certain now that the document did not specify that the patients had to be placed in hospitals in the U.S. It probably only demanded comparable care. Well, Chinese care was close enough to the psychiatric care Vermeers provided.

America was the dumping ground for the rest of the world’s crap. Whenever anybody anywhere got to the point where they could pour steel into a mold or weave cotton into fabric, we got it. Dishes, pots and pans, cotton, dresses, television sets, tape recorders, shoes, automobiles. If they could dump their shit on us it was only right that we be able to dump a little of our shit on them. It would make family visits a little more arduous but families with patients in hospitals could combine business and pleasure.

A public bottle of Chinese white lightening appeared on the table. Everyone emptied their water glasses into their soup bowls and passed the bottle around. The Wongs rose to complete the public ceremony. “We would like to drink to our absent friend the administrator and the eternal friendship between psychiatric institutions of our two countries and twenty-nine dollars a month per patient,” he said in fluent English.

Mash was suddenly stone sober. Twenty-nine a month, he thought. His troubles were finally over. Things had worked out in the end as he had had faith they would. He rose and lifted his glass. “I would like to propose a toast also. “To the patients of Vermeers,” he said. “May they develop an insatiable appetite for chop suey.”

Chapter 28

Reality stands behind its illusions

“I’m going to call a meeting,” Dr. Heirath told Strayte when he saw him at breakfast the day after no Chinese showed up at his office.

“Why?”

“They need to know.”

“Who needs to know?”

“The patients.”

“The only real patients we’ve had in a week went home yesterday on the bus to the college,” Strayte insisted. “We only have staff.”

“The staff then.”

“Why?”

“Why what.”

“Why do they need to know?”

“We know.”

“I know the Chinese didn’t show up.”

“Not here. At Mashes office. Worse.”

“What’s worse?”

“See we need a meeting.”

“Tell me now,” Strayte said.

“It’s bad, really bad, You don’t want to know. Mr. Chameleon told me. It’s horrible.”

“You’re right, you should call a meeting.”

“I don’t have to.”

“Why not.”

“Because the patients already called a meeting.”

“Why?”

“Because they know more than we do and wanted to make sure we knew.”

“What? What do they know that we don’t know?”

“The Chinese.”

“We knew the Chinese were coming. They showed up at Mashes. Not a single of the billion of Chinese came to your office, not one. Why is what I want to know. Do the patients know why?”

“No, but they know something else?”

“What.”

“See we really do need a meeting.”

“Do you think they can handle it?”

“I can handle it,” Dr. Heirath said, “why shouldn’t they.”

“They are patients in a lunatic asylum,” Strayte replied.

“And I’m a liver doctor in a lunatic asylum. I’m also acting administrator and acting chief medical officer, who is acting chief psychiatrist. If the three of me can take it why shouldn’t they. They are only one apiece, like you.”

“I’m not sure I can handle it,” Strayte said. “I think they called a meeting so that they could call a strike vote.”

“There are worse things than a strike vote to worry about. Rationality will triumph,” Heirath said.

Strayte shook his head. “It has already that’s why I’m worried. They only want an excuse to call a strike vote because there’s some money coming in.”

“A strike vote is the least of our problems,” Heirath insisted. “You’ll see at the meeting.”

“You’re right,” Strayte said, holding his head tightly with his hands. “A strike wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen now. A meeting is probably the worse thing that could happen now.”

“It’s time. Lets go,” Heirath said and dragged Strayte up and out the door.

The meeting started promptly at 10.am with an announcement by the two Japanese who were co-chairman, that it was being postponed at little while ‘certain people’aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa got themselves together. To kill time during the interim, one of the sous chefs laid out a tray with snacks. “We’re test marketing these hors d’oeuvres. What do you think?”

“I think rich sane people will like these. They are awful,” one patient declared.

“Their aroma doesn’t remind you of Provence in the spring?” the sous chef wanted to know.

“They smell like Staten Island in the summer,” a patient spitting one out said.

“They won some bake off,” the sous chef remarked, dumping them in a trash container. “We just modified the starches a little.”

At 10.30 the meeting was called to order with an apology for the late start. Everyone was there including four non-patients, the four assistants of Mr. Cricket whom Strayte had never seen outside of the laboratory the ex-Nobel prize laureate maintained at Vermeers.

After May made a motion to adjourn until after lunch, Strayte stood up quickly. “I suggest that the vote on adjourning be postponed until everyone is brought up to date on current events by anyone who knows anything,” he said and pulled Dr. Heirath up to the podium quickly, before any of the patients could object.

“The visit by the patients from the college,” Dr. Heirath began, “was very successful. You really did very well as staff. The inspector from the government was impressed and…”

“Thank you doctor,” said Strayte, “perhaps we could…”

“They were pretty disorderly,” Nurse G whispered loudly.

“They didn’t seem like real crazy people to me,” Frank Hymut added. “They couldn’t weigh themselves at all. They kept their clothes on and only got on one scale and whatever it told them they weighed they…”

“O.K.,” Strayte said. “Maybe I can summarize the most important current events. The guy who runs the hospital is trying to screw us.”

“You mean that Dr. Heirath there is trying to screw us,” a patient exclaimed.

“No, not Dr. Heirath here, the lawyer for the board there,” he said, pointing in the direction of the third wing. “Mash.”

“He invited us to the ball,” one patient said, defending him. “How bad can he be?”

“Actually Dr. Heirath invited us to the ball. Mash disinvited us. Dr. Beeper is conniving with him.”

“Oh,” the patient said.

“There are three different groups who want to buy the hospital and close it,” Strayte said, summarizing the report that Mr. Chameleon had given him and Dr. Heirath. “Mash has had a meeting of them to see if they could work out a deal to keep everything quiet.”

“I’m a little confused,” someone in the back said. “Could we get a clearer idea from Mr. Chameleon.” Strayte shrugged and sat down.

Mr. Chameleon got up and recreated the meetings. When he got to the point where the mall developer called Tex spoke, the woman Strayte had seen in the library talking to the well dressed visitor screamed. “That son of a bitch, that bastard. That’s the prick who been keeping me here. For five years,” she yelled.

Mr. Chameleon stopped the recicitative while Dr. Heirath calmed her down. “I don’t need to be calmed down I need to get out and eat the bastard alive. I’ll make him pay, I swear it, some how, some way. Five years ago he wanted my money to speculate in real estate. I refused. He arranged to have me declared crazy. The old administrator and the ex chief medical officer managed to have some dead psychiatrist make the diagnosis. Since then I’ve rotted here. I have a lawyer but he doesn’t seem to be able to do anything. I’ve rotted here for five years trying to get out and now that bastard won’t even let me rot here in peace. He’s using my money to kick me out of the place I’ve been trying desperately to get out of for five years and wants to put me in a worse place for the rest of my life.” She broke down in tears. “There’s no justice,” she screamed.

Emile and Emily got up and went over to her. “There is justice,” Emily said, “I’m sure there is justice, you just don’t seem to have a lawyer who knows where to look for it. Some lawyers are like that. I’m sure we can help.”

“I’m certain we can,” Emile said.

Strayte got up before Mr. Chameleon could continue.

“Look. Mash had a meeting with the people who want to buy the hospital. He got them to agree to work together to do it. Then we had an inspection from the government because someone called anonymously, probably Mash, and said we didn’t have any staff but all of us are staff so that was wrong but we needed patients because it was a little hard for most of us to do both things at the same time, so then there was an inspection and there were a lot of new temporary patents who were really students who went home after lunch. That’s about all.”

Heirath got up as Strayte sat down. “Not quite,” he said. “A visiting delegation of Chinese psychiatrists has come and agreed to take all of the patients in Vermeers to China to be put in a mental hospital there. That eliminates the one hurdle that prevented Mash and Dr. Beeper from closing the hospital.”

Strayte seemed to be the only person in the room who was surprised.

A patient in the back raised his hand. “Excuse me,” he said, “I’m a little confused.”

Heirath thought the summary was concise and clear.”What are you confused about?”

“About the part about taking a break and starting the meeting after lunch.”

“That’s been postponed until the meeting gets started,” Heirath said.

“Oh. Well I’m confused about the other part too. Could Mr. Chameleon sort of show us the next part of the meeting. And maybe then he could show us about the Chinese. When you tell it it’s confusing. When Mr. Chameleon shows us, he’s very concrete. He makes it clear.”

Heirath gave up and sat down as Mr. Chameleon got up and resumed his reproduction of the meeting of the competitors. Everyone watched his performance intently until he got to the part where the Japanese competitor, Mr. Torosuko defended his proposal.

The two Japanese spokes-people rose slowly and wailed and bowed continuously.

“It is our fault. We resign as strike leaders. We are two former employees of Nagahusi Pharmaceuticals. We did not know otherwise. Formerly worked for Torosuko, in Poughkeepsie. Bought raw material. Sold reagents.”

“We did not know Mr. Cricket was Dr. Edward Tull only that he very interesting and strange man who worked in laboratory making crickets. Otherwise we would never have mentioned Mr. Cricket to representative of employer who came to visit after our breakdown, bringing breath of Japan and saki and noodles. We thought he was only being caring for employees in a bit of pickle. We told him much about the hospital, each week.”

“How did you know about Dr. Tull then?” one of the other patients wanted to know.

“We push him sometime to laboratory in morning. We used to work in laboratory too, trying to make frogs. It is our fault.”

Out of the corner of his eye off to the side Mr. Cricket sat on his chair prodigiously consuming all of the energy available to him to hold the form of Dr. Tull. “It wasn’t your fault. How could you know?”

Behind Tull stood his four assistants.

“I’m lost,” Strayte whispered to Heirath.

“Don’t look at me,” the acting administrator said. “I thought you might have some idea.

Tull was beginning to flicker, seesawing from the form of Dr. Tull to the form of the blob of flesh that rolled around in the wheelchair. One of his assistants spoke up for him.

“Dr. Tull thinks it would be better if he left Vermeers now. If the Japanese want him they will stop at very little to get him. If they think he is going to escape they will do something drastic. It is better if he goes before they think anything is wrong.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Dr. Tull croaked to the two Japanese. “It does not matter, someone was bound to find out I was alive and here. I think it is best…” His words dribbled off to a splattering mumble. The assistant who was acting as Tull’s spokesman bent his head so that he could hear the mumble Dr. Tull was producing.

“That I leave as soon as possible,” Tull’s spokesman continued, speaking for the oscillating entity on the chair. “It is Important though that you not tell anyone I am gone.” His four assistants pressed around him, anxious and vigilant.

“Can he do that?” Strayte asked.

“Leave?” Heirath said. “He won a Nobel prize, I guess he can. He’s a voluntary paying patient.”

“Punishment,” the Japanese patients said, “punishment for treachery certain. Nagahusi in deep trouble if they cannot get Tull. Bet store on project for which we believe now, reviewing things, Tull has become necessary and essential.”

As the four people around Tull formed a protective cordon and hustled him to the door, Strayte got up to head off another presentation by Mr. Chameleon. “It sounds to be like we have one colossal immediate problem which is that Triff has found a way to meet the requirement that the foundation place patients in an established hospital which will provide comparable care. The Chinese psychiatrists who are visiting have agreed in principle to accept the patients and put them in a Chinese mental hospital. He looked at the patient who had been confused earlier. Is that clear?” he asked. The patient nodded.

Nick Strayte shifted his attention to Emile and Emily. “Is there anything we can do?”

Emile and Emily stood up. “We’ve looked over the wording of the stipulation and to be honest it specifies only an established hospital providing comparable case. It does not say anything about where. It does not specifically state that it must be in the U.S.” Emile said, “not even on this planet. Emily feels certain any action would be reversible but by then we would be speaking Yunnan Hua and gotten used to rice.”

“We are looking for something that might delay them,” Emily continued, “not attack the Chinese plan directly but slow them down until we could think of something else. but we have not been able to come up with anything yet.”

The slowly moving circle of Dr. Tull and his assistants slowed then stopped its slow trek to the exit. A crackling babel came from the wheelchair as Dr. Tull started to speak but lost his battle with blobness and collapsed into the amorphous mound of flesh that Strayte has pushed to the laboratory across the fields.

“I think we should be out of here now,” one of the assistants said to the blob. And then to the assembled inmates. “Being Dr. Tull is very trying to him.”

“Wait,” came a screech from the formless mass on the chair. An arm took shape at the end of which was a clenched fist. Edward Tull opened it slowly and obviously with great difficulty. Out jumped two crickets, one spun upward and made a somersault. The other hopped along the ground its backside glowing like a firefly. Dr. Tull’s four assistants reformed a small protective circle around him and pushed his chair quickly to a van that was waiting outside. The crickets hoped and danced behind him.

“Do you think he was trying to tell us anything,” Strayte asked the acting administrator.

“Yeah, good bye.”

“Anything else?”

“No.”

“Why two crickets?”

“Why not? He wanted to go out with a flourish.”

“They were two different crickets, two different species almost.”

“They looked the same to me. Crickets,” Heirath said. “Has all of this gotten to you Strayte?”

Nick Strayte thought for a moment. There was something else, but he just could not think of it.

At that moment Emile and emily stood up. “I, we just thought of something. In the case of Orange country vs. Smarg Dumpster,” Emile said, “a shift of land use required meeting all of the existing federal government requirements for the management of land.”

“And in Tireen vs. EPA,” added Emily,” the requirement that an environmental impact statement be submitted be…” She stopped. “I think we can delay them,” she said, smiling at Strayte and waving at Dr. Tull as the last of his wheelchair disappeared behind the door of the van.

The patients waved at the departing Mr. Cricket and got up and stretched and relaxed. “Wait,” Heirath yelled from the podium, “wait. That was a really interesting and informative meeting,” Heirath said as he stood up. “I guess its all we really need to fill us in. The details are not so important. If some of it was totally confusing, well,” he said,” we can meet again tomorrow when things will probably have changed completely. Is there any great news?” he asked. “I mean the fact that Emile and Emily think we can hold the swindlers up for a while is good news but its not great news, is there any great news?”

“I have some very good news,” Leonard Mittleman said. “Last week the restaurant and the computer school and the boutique and the art gallery grossed 43,023 dollars. The suicide hot line billed 8,024 dollars.”

“That really is good news,” Dr. Heirath said encouragingly.

“That’s good news but not great news,” the businessman added. “The great news is I think I see a way to turn it into a million six in a few days.”

Heirath glanced at Strayte who had a pained look on his face.

“We’ll that sounds like great news,” the acting administrator said. “I’m sure you want to talk the scheme over with Mr. Murdoch and Dr. Strayte tomorrow. Anything else?” the doctor asked.

“I move for a strike vote,” a voice came from the back.

“I second the move,” another voice said.

“All in favor,” came anonymously from the side.

Every hand in the room except Strayte’s went up.

“A strike could be news, I guess” the doctor said, “not great news but news. Why don’t Mr. Hirosi and Mr. Tsai and Dr. Strayte and May form a temporary strike committee and work out the details. “I have some great news. He held up an official looking certificate. “This is from the govt, the federal government, our government. Last week we were the best lunatic asylum in the country.” He held up the certificate. ‘Best in Class,’ it said,” Vermeers; Finest crazy house in the country.”

Chapter 29

Wisdom, for the ant, is not walking on sidewalks even if the cracks are filled with candy and cake

Even before Billy Bekinski joined the police force he was reasonably honest. The boys around him, his friends, were always looking for trouble and boosting cars and breaking into stores. He never did any of that stuff. Dressing up like someone who had stolen a car or broken into a store was excitement enough. After he joined the police force, he had been even more reasonably honest. He avoided even dressing up as someone who would do such a thing.

But the two men he approached on a day when he was alone in the car—because Helen was sick, and no one else would ride with him—made him an offer that was irresistible. He had confronted them even though they were looking for trouble because they were dressed in appealing cowboy costumes. When he got closer, he recognized them. They had gone to the same high school as he had. They had been two years ahead of him and boosted cars and robbed a store occasionally. But after they graduated, he had not seen them for a long time and in the costumes he hardly recognized them.

“We’ve done time,” they said, “bank robbery.” Billy warned them that this was a clean town and that he was a police officer.

“We know that,” the smaller of the pair said. “We weren’t thinking of doing anything bad. Do you still like to dress up in costumes?”

Billy nodded.

The other man who was baby faced and shifty eyed and had the nicer costume looked at him. “We got arrested because we just went into the bank looking like high school students,” he said. “We weren’t wearing anything but our regular clothing. That’s why we got caught. If we had dressed up like Billy the Kid’s gang they wouldn’t have touched us.”

Billy agreed. “Billy the Kid’s costume was a great costume.”

“You would make a great Billy the Kid,” the shifty eyed man said. “You want to rob a bank dressed as Billy the Kid and the Hole in the Wall gang?” the man asked. “We will be the Hole in the Wall gang.”

“Now that’s an idea,” his partner added, squinting at Billy. “You would have to be Billy, I mean you would look just like him if you had boots and a hat and a six shooter.”

Billy thought about it.

“Robbing a bank is against the law,” Billy said. “It’s dangerous and someone could get hurt.”

“No,” the taller man said. “We’d just be pretending. We wouldn’t hurt anyone. We could load our guns with blanks.”

“I’m a policeman,” Billy remembered sadly.

“Well you could use real bullets but it wouldn’t matter because we would only be dressing up. No one would get hurt and we could even give the money back, all except the money we needed to rent the costumes. No one would care.”

The idea grew on Billy. “Could we ride horses?” Billy wanted to know.

“Horses,” the taller man said thoughtfully, “I think horses would be too much. But we could wear bandannas as disguises around our face.”

“…and spurs.”

“Certainly spurs,” the man said.

And no one would get hurt, Billy thought, and decided that afterwards he would run them out of town because he was a cop.

“I’d have to think about it,” said Billy.

“That’s okay,” said the man “we’re staying at Peterson’s motel.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Billy said. “When do we do it?”

Billy wished he was still riding with Helen. But after the time he made love to her, she refused to ride with him and wouldn’t even speak to him anymore. It was like that with Jewish women sometimes. After you had sex with them, they didn’t want to speak to you anymore. He liked Helen but she didn’t know how to have fun. He would have enjoyed telling her about the bank robbery. He thought that maybe he could make up to her by asking if she wanted to participate. At the least, she could watch. It would be great.

~~

Helen O’Rourke had been waiting for reassignment. She had called in sick for a week then, after the Crazy Man’s Ball, finally couldn’t avoid going back to work.

“I don’t feel well,” she told the sergeant on duty, “I don’t think I could handle a patrol car today. How about a desk assignment?”

“We’re short handed today. But Billy called in sick today so you have to ride with Sam Waterston.”

She wondered how fast she could get really sick again, sick enough to go home. Sam Waterston was not Billy’s kind of danger. Waterston was happily married and devoted to his wife. But he was as dangerous as they come. He had been decorated four times for going into treacherous situations with his guns blazing. He was an atrocious shot and he had never hit anything. But he was lucky. Each time he terrorized the perps into surrendering.

She cowered in her seat. “I love police work, the shooting, the guns,” he said as he drove the patrol car. “There are these guys holding up a liquor store. And they think everything is under control and then pow, you leap in with guns blazing and you yell freeze, police, and they realize nothing is under control, nothing and they throw down their guns and things are under control again, only you are controlling it.”

“It’s a slow night though,” he lamented, “probably nothing more than lost dogs.” He rode with his ear glued to the radio and his eyes surveying the street for anything that didn’t look right, anything that might turn into trouble if he hung around and watched it long and carefully enough. He was neat and relaxed. His bullet proof jacket lay in the back tucked neatly under a special gauge non issue shotgun he kept for extraordinary occasions which he hoped might arise. His wife had packed his supper in a paper bag that also held a mystery novel.

When the call came for all the cars that were available to go to the scene of a six car pile up, he ignored it. “Dull, dull, dull. All the action happened already what’s the fun in that,” and continued to weave in and out of streets while Helen shrunk down on her side of the seat continuously checking her safety belt.

When the call came about a bank robbery in progress, she insisted on going to the scene of the car accident immediately.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “We’ll probably be the only car that’s available because all of the other honkers are at that crash which is on the other side of town.” He had not won a citation for anything in a while and he was hungering for a situation in which he could plunge in, pistol exploding, bang, bang, bang, and prove he was fearless and in control—and collect an award.

When the reached the bank it was quiet.

“Let’s wait here for backup,” Helen said.

“Silly,” he said, “we know there’s a robbery in progress why wait. What if they change their mind while we’re waiting. No.” He un-holstered his gun as soon as he left the car and walked up to the bank door and looked in. Helen slunk behind him petrified.

The bank was not crowded. The few customers stood against a wall with most of the bank employees with their hand up. Three men with bandannas around their faces and large western hats and boots with spurs that tinkled as they hit the ground held sacks open into which a teller was pouring money.

“Lets wait for backup. There are bystanders there they might get hurt,” Helen said, and tugged at Waterston’s arm.

“Shit no,” he said, “we can catch those wussies stone cold.” He checked his revolver and retrieved the extra gun he carried in an ankle holster. “Crazy shit,” Sam Waterston said and pushed open the door. Helen slipped in behind him

“Freeze, police. You’re under arrest,” he shouted, and started shooting. Helen tried to make her self very small.

In the face of the fusillade of bullets two of the robbers immediately threw down their weapons. The third turned toward Waterston.

“You’re dealing with Billy the Kid’s gang,” he said, “take this,” and shot Helen’s partner through the heart.

Helen O’Rourke stood there as Sam Waterston collapsed slowly. He had a surprised look on his face. He was gurgling through the blood that was seeping from his mouth.

She looked at the single bank thief who was taking aim at her.

There was something familiar about him, something that she did not want to remember. She thought of taking cover behind the teller machine that was along side of her. She could drop down behind it until backup arrived holding the three robbers there. The crazy one could shoot as much as he wanted.

Then she remembered the employees and customers. The robbers might take them hostage. She spread her legs, pitched back and took aim. The robber who had his gun pointed at her hesitated as if seeing her reminded him of something he had forgotten, as if he wanted to say something. He dropped the bag he had been holding and raised his hand as if he were reaching for the bandanna that covered his face. “It’s…” Helen squeezed the trigger. As he slid to the ground she realized Billy the Kid was Billy Bekinski.

~~

Poepple Schwartz was temporarily on the day shift but he was still driving the horse wagon. One of the other regular day shift drivers was in the hospital with a case of the clap and a fractured arm that a married couple had given him after an evening of fun in the van.

The day shift was not bad, but Poepple preferred nights. “I prefer nights,” he told his boss when he was asked to drive during the day.

“For a few days until Gunther gets better,” his boss said. “You’re the best night person we have. I wouldn’t think of having you work days except this is an emergency,” so he was working days. But Gunther had misplaced the van and while his boss was trying to locate the vehicle he drove the horse wagon.

He heard the call over the radio about the pile up of cars but decided not to go. All of the ambulances from all of the hospitals would be there to transport the injured and their lawyers. The other drivers from Universal transport would be there working the crowd for customers among the uninjured family members of victims who wanted to go to the hospitals to be with the victims and their lawyers.

And the tow truck driver’s would be calling insurance companies and pulling the jumble of cars apart so that they could be towed away to the garages where claims agents and other lawyers were waiting. With the blood and gore providing the serious entertainment, the onlookers would look for some light amusement and he and the horse wagon would be it. He thought about it and decided to keep driving around looking for business.

When he saw the three men dressed as cowboys get out of the car in front of the bank he decided to stop and wait and see if anything interesting was going to happen. He was not disappointed. First the police call came over the radio then the patrol car came up and the two cops went into the bank then there was the shooting. Then he saw two of the cowboys run out and get into a blue Buick. He took down the license in case it might be important then he went into the bank. One of the policemen was dead on the floor and the other policeman who was a police woman was sitting on the floor holding the head of the third cowboy on her lap. Tears were streaming down her face. He went over to her to see if he could help but she was talking to the dying cowboy.

“Helen it was a great costume wasn’t it?” the head on her lap said to her. “You didn’t recognize me did you?”

“No, Billy,” Helen said. “I thought you were…”

“Billy the Kid,” Poepple Schwartz prompted quietly.

“Billy the Kid,” Helen said.

“The body is a great costume,” he said. “I’m going to miss it. I’m sorry if I hurt you,” he wheezed, “when…”

Helen was silent.

“I’m sorry we never did it again, too,” he added. “Helen.”

“Yes.”

“Pull my bandanna over my face.” She did as he asked.

“Do you think I would look better as an angel or a devil?” he asked Helen but before she could answer, he died.

She put his head down on the marble and tried to get but lost her footing and fell. She struggled to get up.

“Are you shot?” Poepple Schwartz asked. She looked at him.

“No. You’re the man in the horse wagon,” she said. “Take me to Vermeers.”

Poepple Schwartz did not want to interfere in the police investigation. “Don’t you think we should wait until the police come?”

“I am the police.”

“I mean other police.”

“I need to go to Vermeers,” she said. She retrieved her weapon from the floor but when she tried to stand up her feet slipped and slid and she stumbled again and fell and let out a wail that made his hair stand up. “Chassis,” she screamed. “Chassis. I want to go to Vermeers,” she repeated and fell on the floor again.

Poepple Schwartz laid the piece of paper with the license number of the car that sped away from the bank, gently on the body of the dead police officer. The customers and bank employees were buzzing and running around. He expected that someone was putting in another call to the police.

He helped the policewoman who wanted to go to Vermeers to the horse wagon and laid her down in the back. In the shape she was in she looked like she would be better in the back, on the straw, than riding next to him in the front seat. As soon as she touched the floor she curled into a ball. He covered her with the emergency blanket that was embroidered with the phrase ‘Sender Stables; Gentle Horses for the Beginning Horseperson, and took her to Vermeers.

When Poepple Schwartz put Helen O’Rourke in the back of the horse wagon he didn’t expect her to come out with a corkscrew he could use, not a real one. She was not really crazy, not the way most of the other crazy people he had brought to Vermeers were crazy. She had just killed someone so she was distraught. She was a policewoman so it was all right. All she did in the back of the van was moan “Chassis, Vermeers,” and a name, “Nick Strayte,” that sounded familiar although he could not recall from where.

Only once between moans she did say something interesting. He copied it immediately into his book. She said, “The warning shot warns the shooter.”

It did not make sense to him but he copied it down. Later, he would think about it and see if it qualified as a corkscrew.

When he got to Vermeers he helped her out and supported her as they went in to look for the doctor.

Dr. Heirath recognized Helen. “What happened?” he asked.

“I need to see Nick,” she said. “Billy. Nick Strayte.”

“He’s up with the patients,” Heirath said. “Why don’t you wait here and I’ll get him.”

“No,” Helen said, “I’ll come up.”

“You sure you’re up to it?”

“I am,” she said, “I can,” then she collapsed.

“Go to the ward,” he told Poepple. “Ask for Nick Strayte,” and he bent down to look at his patient. He carried her to the nearest empty room on the floor and laid her down on the bed. She was exhausted. He checked her liver. It was fine. Her pulse was racing and she was in shock. He made her comfortable and sat by her side until he heard Nick Strayte running.

“Here,” he yelled, “in here.”

“Helen,” Strayte said when he saw her. “What’s wrong, has she been shot? What…”

Poepple drifted in and stood out of the way, watching.

“No, no wounds. Just shock and exhaustion. Her liver is fine, I checked it.” Strayte moved to her side. She was moaning. She opened her eyes. “Chasis, Nick, Chasis.”

“It’s everywhere,” Strayte said. What happened?”

“I killed him Nick. I shot him.”

“Who?”

“Billy my partner, he…”

“Did he try?”

“No,” he was,” she stumbled into crying, “he was robbing a bank, in a disguise, He was pointing a gun at me. I didn’t recognize him…I did Nick, some part of me, some part of me knew who it was. He was lowering…I shot him. He killed Sam Waterston the cop I was riding with. He was pointing the gun he was lowering the gun but I shot him Nick. I wasn’t sure, I couldn’t tell, I could, I…”

“Don’t think about it. Let it go. Relax.”

He turned to Poepple Schwartz. “Thanks for bringing her. Do you know what happened?” Poepple Schwartz told him what he had seen.

“Look,” Strayte said, “ don’t go to the cops, don’t volunteer any information. If the police come to Universal and ask you, you tell them what you know. It will take them days to piece things together if they ever do. Just don’t go to them. Let them come to you. Perhaps she can have a few days peace until the shit hits the fan.”

“It already did,” Poepple said.

“I mean the second load.”

“O.K.,” Poepple said. “I didn’t do anything wrong did I?”

“No,” Strayte said, “you did fine. Thank you.”

“Thank you. I still remember what you said about darkness, that it travels as fast as light.”

“Faster,” Strayte said, “faster.”

Helen O’Rourke moaned. Her body jerked in random spasms. Strayte held her hand and stroked her face. “Everything will be O.K.,” he said. He removed her holster and covered her with a blanket. “Can I stay?” she asked. “Can I stay here for a few days.”

“Of course,” Strayte said, looking at the doctor. “For a few days, to rest. Rest,” he said, “rest.”

Nick Strayte stayed with her most of the afternoon. He fed her soup and toast that one of the sous chefs brought over from the restaurant. She slept the same restless, heaving sleep that he remembered from somewhere. A stream of patients came to ask about her.

Later, when she awoke she seemed better.

“Nick.”

“Yes.”

“Nick where am I?”

“Vermeers.”

“How did I get here?”

“The horse wagon,” was all he could say.

“I remember, she said. “I remember he fell in front of me. He had such a surprised look on his face. Billy shot him.”

Strayte said nothing.

“I killed him, Nick. I shot Billy. Some part of me knew it was him, Nick. I knew it was Billy. He had a bandanna on his face but I knew it was him. I shot him Nick. He was…” She faltered, then resumed her monologue. “He was pointing his gun, he was lowering it, Nick, and I shot him. Why Nick?”

“He was pointing a gun at you.”

“He wouldn’t have…No, he just, I, he wanted me to…I shot him Nick.”

“You couldn’t know he wasn’t going to shoot. He already killed your partner. It was your life or his.”

“No Nick, I mean…I don’t know. It knew it was Billy. When he saw me…When he was lying in my lap dying, he…Oh, Nick.” She fell back and drifted into her troubled sleep.

He sat in the chair holding her hand until he found he could not keep himself from dozing off then he let go of her hand and lay down on the bed beside her.

The first thing he saw in the dim light was that someone was pointing a gun at him. He could not make out if it was a real gun or a child’s toy. It looked like one of those toy guns which drops a little flag that says, ‘Bang, You’re Dead,’ when the trigger is pulled, but he couldn’t be sure.

“Don’t worry about that malingerer,” a voice from behind him said. Superman pushed in front of him and punched the man with the gun who deflated like a balloon and flopped to the floor. “It’s a dangerous world,” Superman said.

Strayte just looked at him.

“Am I?”

“Well I’m not quite sure,” Superman said cheerfully. “Who knows? It is a lunatic asylum.”

Strayte felt an itch. “I’m…”

“Oh why worry about your state of mental health. Dreams asleep or dreams awake. You’re a sociologist, between the profane and the sacred there’s the finest line.”

“It may be a fine line when you’re flying a thousand miles up in the air but on the ground it’s a wall between two worlds.”

“That’s an interesting discovery for a sociologist to make,” Superman said,” but it’s a little late don’t you think. Far up and away isn’t such a good place to see things from.”

Strayte looked at him.

“Would you like to go flying again?” Superman asked.

“No,” Strayte answered.

“I didn’t think so. We could walk.”

“Where?”

“Oh, anywhere, and talk.”

“About what,” Strayte asked suspiciously.

“About anything you wanted to. About computerized chains of franchised lunatic asylums, genetic engineering, boutiques, restaurants, anything.”

“I don’t want to talk about any of those things. I’m not sure I want to talk to you at all,” he said remembering their last conversation in the library.

“I think I know how you feel,” Superman said. “How do you like this place? It’s your first time in a lunatic asylum. Have you observed a lot?”

“I’m not sure. You adapt,” Strayte said. “After a while you don’t see the lunacy.”

“I know,” Superman said. “Sometimes I forget I am a cartoon character, I think its all real. Do you know what I mean?”

Strayte nodded.

“I mean Krypton was crazy. They blew themselves up. How crazy can you get. There I couldn’t fly at all but here I can fly faster than a speeding bullet and leap large building in a single bound. And they are putting genes in animals and making new kinds of crickets and pigs that grow human blood and putting baboon livers in people. Sometimes I forget.”

“What?”

“That I’m not on Krypton, or in a frame on a page of a comic book. How do you live with the illusion, Nick?” Superman asked.

“I don’t know. I thought I knew once. I don’t know anymore,” he said.

“Now Billy there. Dressed as Captain kid,” Superman began.

“As Billy the Kid.”

“It doesn’t matter now, he’s dead. He dresses up as Captain Kid and kills another policeman and his former partner whom he raped and knows or doesn’t know who he is really, kills him. Doesn’t make much sense does it?”

“No.”

“No more than one of these crazy murderers who kills a dozen boys and keeps parts of their bodies in a shrine in his room. Of course it makes a little more sense than the chaos of the first second of the universe. Maybe about as much as great hordes of people slaughtering other great hordes of people because, because…”

“They hate them.”

“No, they don’t know them. It’s only that their great great grandfathers hated their great great grandfathers. I think it’s the computers,” Superman said. “I can’t remember whether we had computers on Krypton. I expect we must have. Maybe they got to be so good at imitating people you couldn’t tell anymore.”

“Computers aren’t people.”

“Of course not, only they imitate people very very well. They dissolve differences. You know like the brain. Inside the brain a crazy thought and a rational thought, and music and art and lust and hate they’re all the same. Little voltages coursing through the brain. Not art at all. That’s what computers made clear. They don’t forget.”

“They don’t think. People think.”

“Ah yes,” Superman said. “They think of creative ways of slaughtering people, of shoving everyone whose different into a camp. They think of eating while everyone else starves. They think of franchising lunatic asylums run by computers.”

“Go away.”

“I thought your idea of using students as crazy patients was very creative, Nick. Not as creative as Dr. Tull’s modification of the gene for hopping or for lighting up the tails of crickets by splicing in the gene for a firefly’s rear end.”

“Go away.”

“I’m sorry Nick I didn’t want to upset you. You’re sure you wouldn’t like to try to fly again.”

“Where to?” Strayte asked.

“Oh, maybe the woods. We might find one that wasn’t being eaten by the acid rain. Or Mexico. You always liked Mexico near the sea. We could go there. There’s a little mental hospital there you might like. There are no patients there anymore. It’s called El Mexico, near San Luis de la Loma.”

“Go away.” Strayte’s voice was insistent.

“I can understand,” Superman said. “Flying isn’t so appealing any more. I understand. How about skipping. Skipping is fun. This is the way you skip.”

“I know how to skip.”

“You knew once how to skip. Do you think you still remember?”

“Of course I still remember.”

“Show me.”

Strayte got up. “This is the way you skip.” He started moving his feet. They tangled and he fell.

“Not the way I remember it,” Superman said, “not the way I remember it at all,” and disappeared as the light being turned on struck Strayte full in the face. When he got up Helen was looking at him. “You were moaning Nick. Was it a bad dream?”

He shrugged. “How do you feel?”

“I feel like there’s a ball rolling around in my head.”

“Are you up to breakfast?” Strayte asked.

“I’m famished.”

“Welcome to Vermeers,” he said as he took her arm.

Chapter 30

Waking up is the best proof you’ve been asleep

Martin Mash was in his office wrapped snugly in a fantasy when he got a call from Peter Triff. In this fantasy he was relaxing on a beach in Mexico. Exotic women in sarongs cast romantic curved shadows on the hot sand. He wasn’t sure that Mexican women wore sarongs but it did not matter. He was a rich man on a hard earned vacation during which reality would have to defer to pleasure.

The phone call shattered the fantasy. It wasn’t even from Triff but from the new Korean automatic phone caller-dialer that Triff just bought from a catalogue store in Seoul. “Hello,” it said, “this is a call from Peter Triff. Peter Triff isn’t actually speaking to you, real time. His new automatic dialer-call forwarder placed this call which he recorded earlier. ‘Hello Mash. I wanted you to know that the Japs and Tex and me almost have everything worked out. Set up a board meeting to finalize the deal. Today’s Monday. Thursday should be fine.’”

“Triff,” Mash shouted. “You dunce. Can you hear this?”

“‘I cannot hear anything you are saying now,’” the Peter Triff’s voice continued, “‘because I will not be on the phone when you receive this call. If you want to leave a message for me wait until you hear the tone. You have…‘“ in the background Peter Triff’s beeper exploded. “‘Shit,’” he said, “‘emergency,’” and went away.

“Fuck you Triff, you little cunt,” Mash screamed.

He yelled to Louise. “How is the negligee coming?”

He could not figure out what she was doing that took so long. Yesterday, he had watched while she disassembled the entire garment and worked on what he took to be the place her tits fit into. She was doing something to it although he couldn’t fathom what. “Louise.”

“It’s very complicated,” his niece called back from her office. “I’m still working on it.”

“Louise, I have work for you. Call the members of the board. Tell them we’re going to have an emergency meeting on Thursday morning. Remind them that it’s a morning meeting. Tell them two or three times. They are old, Louise, they forget.”

“Yes,” uncle Martin.

“Tell them that if they show up, they get paid extra for this meeting.”

“Yes,” uncle Martin.

As far as Martin Mash could see, the business of closing Vermeers was wrapped up. There was nothing left to do but sign whatever papers Triff and his partners brought for him to sign. Yet something nagged at him, an annoying, vague, irritation that murmured to him that there was some detail that still needed to be taken care of, some detail he had overlooked. He could sense it, he could almost feel where its rough edge rubbed on his brain. He just couldn’t reach out and close his hand around it and pull it in. He just couldn’t remember.

He tried to follow the advice of the book that Louise had bought at the book store near the restaurant in the second wing. He tried pre-remembering the detail. He closed his eyes.

The daylight from the end of the tunnel streamed on his desk. It was a strange daylight, produced by a strange sun; a mall, genetic engineering, beepers, franchised mental hospitals run by computers. But it was shining on him. It would brighten his life with money. For the patients of Vermeers there was also Chinese daylight at the end of the tunnel, streaming in on a slant from somewhere far away. It was a thick, turbid, dark sunlight. They could learn to enjoy it or not: It was not his problem. It was time to leave Vermeers behind. The Crazy Man’s Ball had been a failure but he would be more careful next year. Next year. There would not be a Crazy Man’s Ball next year. The detail snapped in his face. He opened his eyes. The closing of the hospital meant that there would be no more Crazy Man’s Balls. The people who mattered in town would be pissed.

Given enough time, the elite of the community would find a different occasion to celebrate with a ball. They would reinvent insanity if they had to, to allow the ball to continue. But worse than the demise of the ball, which would be temporary, was the demise of the tax write offs. The widows and orphans and doctors and lawyers and accountants would not appreciate the fact that there would be no more donations to Vermeers. The foundation would change its name. His job would continue. But the new ponography project would have no place for bales of clothing and crates of furniture. The nabobs would probably come up with something to absorb the tax write offs too, but it would take time. He knew that the elite of the community would not understand his position. It was clear that people were selfish, The fact that he stood to make a lot of money by closing Vermeers would not mean shit to them. The only thing they would think of was that they would be deprived of an easy tax write off and the occasion to celebrate it.

He tried to think of what might be done. There was no way of keeping the hospital alive so to speak after it was dead, the way he had kept his father occupying the position of president of the board ten years after the old man had finally died. The detail that he forgot was to find someone who would catch the shit from closing the hospital, who could be made to take the blame for the suffering of his friends and neighbors who would selfishly be mad and hell about losing their tax write offs and entertainment.

He thought first of his paralegal and dismissed the idea. Tiny was too far removed from the board and Vermeers to make a plausible scapegoat. He thought of Triff but decided that he needed the young psychiatrist to organize the franchised chain of lunatic asylums which was going to make both of their fortunes.

The gate crashing liver doctor would not hold still long enough to be saddled with all of the blame although he was a candidate for part of it.

He tried to think of someone beside the doctor who would be a likely candidate. They would have to be vulnerable, like Tiny, so that they couldn’t hurt him, defenseless so that he could pummel them without fear of retribution. They would have to have a hand in the hospital already. They would have to be someone that other people could blame naturally, someone who was already blamed for most of the other trouble people had. They would have to be…Haddy Washington. Of course, It was perfect.

The election for officers of Vermeers was a month away. He could make a case for pushing the vote up on the grounds that a great deal of work needed to be done in the transition period and his father, who had been reelected the last ten years after his death, temporarily, until a replacement could be found, was just not up to it. As the person closest to his father Martin Mash had run the board. In the past it was perfect for everyone but times had changed. Women and people of color and the disabled were clamoring for their rightful place in the community and a piece of the action. They could have a piece of it now. Why not. It was time for his father’s replacement.

If he did it right not only he could escape the blame entirely, he could position himself to be able to point the first finger. For starters, the board would vote to sell the hospital to the umbrella group of the Japanese, Triff and Tex. He would sign the papers for his father as president and for himself as the board’s counsel. Immediately afterward they would hold an election for president of the board and elect Haddy Washington. It was perfect. Technically, his father would have been president when the hospital closed but he was dead, and Haddy Washington would be president when the shit hit the fan.

Since she was a black, old, a woman, and crippled, all of the work setting up a new foundation would fall on Tiny, his paralegal. The fallout from the closing of the hospital would fall on her. She would probably resign in disgrace and the board would reelect his father as president and things would be just the way they were now. Until then, she would do what he said because she was poor and the money she made from serving on the board would keep her in line. For the first time in his life Martin Mash thought of himself as a genius.

“Louise,” he yelled.

“It’s not ready,” his niece yelled.

“Have you called the members of the board yet?” Mash inquired.

“Not yet uncle Martin. I’m still working on the part that holds the tits.”

“Put it aside for a little while and call the members of the board. Call Haddy Washington first. I want to talk to her.”

When the phone rang, Haddy Washington was ready to let it wail all afternoon. She was tired and it was probably only a salesman trying to get her to buy something or someone asking for a donation to some charity. It was too early in the day for the emotional struggle. She let it ring and then picked it up slowly. “Don’t talk yet, don’t talk yet,” she screamed into the headpiece and she struggled to get her arm to lift the phone.

Martin Mash never could get the hang of talking to black people. They seemed to talk differently and they seemed to listen differently from the white people he knew. He just didn’t know how to deal with them. “Haddy, Martin Mash here. From the board.” He yelled into the phone. “I know it’s hard for you to speak so you don’t have to say much, just listen and grunt.”

“It’s not hard for me to speak, only to raise my arms,” Haddy Washington said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mash said. “I just wanted to tell you that I’ve called a special meeting of the board of the foundation for Thursday. It’s an extra meeting so the foundation is going to pay you something special for attending. I hope you can make it. It’s really important. This is a special meeting, Haddy. Don’t tell anyone not on the board will you.”

Haddy Washington tried to get her arm to move just enough to get life in her fingers so that she could give him the finger. “I’ll be there,” she said.

“That’s fine Haddy, good bye.”

“Good bye,” she said to the silence and hung up. As she rolled away from the phone her finger finally got the impulse and snapped to attention. “That’s for you, you sneaky load of shit,” she said to the phone. The hospital was done for and there was nothing she could do. She rolled back to the phone and called the liver doctor. There was nothing he could do either but she wanted him to know.

~~

When Mash called the meeting to order the board room was full. Triff and the Japanese and Tex and his MBA’s filled a block of seats in the back of the room next to the odd couple engrossed in their continuing argument.

“We’ve come to do the right thing,” Mash said. “At our last meeting we all agreed I think that Vermeers had outlived its usefulness and that the foundation should sell the hospital and strike out in a new direction. There were some difficulties but now they have been taken care of. An established group of hospitals has agreed to take the patients now in Vermeers. In the spirit of Vermeers, the board will continue to pay in perpetuity for their care no matter how onerous the burden. The three groups who submitted proposals to buy the hospital have agreed to jointly purchase it. There are no obstacles to our completing the transaction. Is there a motion to sell the grounds and physical property of the hospital to the new group of purchasers.

“I, I,” a voice sputtered from a collapsed head in front of him.

“We have a seconded motion.” There was no need to follow the rules of order to the letter. “Are there any people opposed to the sale?”

Haddy Washington started her hand in motion. As Mash stared at her, her hand laboriously moved upward.

“No one opposed,” Mash said, smiling in her direction. “The motion to sell the hospital passes.”

The room was strangely silent.

“There’s one other item of business,” Mash said. “As we move to a new era and a new enterprise it’s time to provide ourselves with new leadership. It’s time for my father to retire as head of this board. It’s time for new blood. I propose we use this meeting to elect a replacement for my father as head of the board.” Coughs came from a few of the heads resting on chests. “I would like to propose Haddy Washington as the new president of the Vermeers corporation.”

Haddy Washington could see what the slimy turd was up to. He was going to line her up to take all of the shit that would be hurled at the board for closing the hospital. “No,” Haddy Washington yelled. “No.”

“Yes,” Mash said,”Yes. I know you can do it. I’m certain you will be wonderful as the president of the board. The time has come for new blood.”

Triff seconded her nomination although he was not a member of the board.

“All those in favor of Haddy Washington as the new president of the Vermeers Foundation raise their hands.” Hands raised slowly.

“All those opposed.”

Haddy Washington told her hand to get up. If there was any time in which she needed it to behave quick it was now. Up, Up. All of the rest of her was in a quiet panic. It was a trick. They were screwing her again. Move, move arm. It moved as if it were shuffling slowly on some upward path. Damned lazy, sick hand, she shouted inside of her. Up, up. Agonizingly, she waved it droopily under Mash’s nose.

He waited for the hand to reach its full height. “Well then it’s unanimous,” he said cheerfully. “Haddy Washington is the new president of the foundation. Meetings over. “

In the back of the room the block of bodies who were the new owners of Vermeers throbbed and hummed together slowly. The couple lost in an argument fell silent for a moment and picked up the rhythm of debate again. In the corner the patient who was preparing to serve coffee stirred out of nowhere into activity and smiled a familiar smile.

“It was done,” Martin Mash thought. “Finally, I won.”

Chapter 31

Safe is never virtuous

Martin Mash decided it was time to celebrate. He asked his wife if she would like to go to lunch. “I know a lovely little place,” he said, “it’s quite close to the hospital. Very continental. You’ll like it.” His wife whom he had not taken out for two months was overjoyed and suspicious.

“What’s the occasion?” she asked.

“Does there have to be an occasion?” Mash asked.

“You only take me out on occasions or when you forget an occasion,” she said. “Has the gate crashing, liver man died?”

“No,” her husband said. He had a choice. He could tell her or he could call a press conference tomorrow. One difference between telling everyone through the gossip mafia that she was at the center of or calling a press conference was that if he called a press conference and was lucky, the newspapers would spell his name wrong and someone else might get the blame for closing Vermeers.

Another difference was that if he told her now she would be on the phone in a few minutes gossiping with her friends and they would tell their husbands and their lovers and within a half hour anyone who meant anything in the community would know about it and his phone would be plagued with people bitching about the loss of tax writeoffs. If he made a public announcement he could rest until the papers came out or at least until the evening news. He decided against telling her. He would call a press conference and announce the election of a new president of the board of the Vermeers’ foundation and the closing of Vermeers in one fell swoop. Then he would tell his wife.

“O.K. Where is this restaurant?” she asked.

“Meet me at my office in the hospital. We’ll go from there. 11:30. Maybe we can get there before the lunch crowd.” He decided to make the reservations himself rather than leaving it to Louise who had not managed to get it right once yet. He dialed the number on the card he had taken from the restaurant. Chez Verms.

“Chez Verms, can I help you?” the pleasant voice asked.

“I want to make a reservation for lunch.”

“For the first seating or the second?” the voice inquired.

“The first.”

“Smoking or non smoking?”

“Non smoking.”

“How many people?” the voice asked.

“Two, my wife and…”

“We do not pry into the private lives of our guests,” the voice said. “Window or non-window?”

“Window,” Mash said. “The name is…”

“Not yet,” the voice said, “not yet. Do you eat noisily or quietly?”

“What?”

“Do you slurp your food or carry it daintily to your mouth,” the voice wanted to know.

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“It’s only for your own good,” the voice said. “If you eat quietly we will try to seat you with other people who eat quietly, otherwise…”

“I eat quietly,” Mash said. “The name…”

“No, not quite done with the questions yet. And your companion?”

“My companion what?”

“Does she slurp her food or carry it daintily to her mouth?”

“She eats like me.”

“Like I,” the voice said. “Will you be eating an ordinary full lunch or one of the specials for the day.

“What are the specials of the day?” Mash wanted to know.

“The list is much too long to tell you over the phone. Which one isn’t important. All we want to know is whether you will be having one.”

“How can I tell whether I’ll be eating one of the specials if you don’t tell me what they are?” Mash asked.

“How you make your life decisions is between you and your maker,” the voice emphasized.”We just wanted to know if…”

“Just an ordinary lunch,” Mash decided. “The name…”

“Not yet,” the voice continued. “Is the woman who will be coming as your wife really your wife or is she your mistress?”

“What?” Mash screamed. What…?”

“If it’s your mistress pretending to be your wife,” the voice said, “we will be sure to emphasize the Mrs. whatever when you come in.”

“Mash, Mrs. Mash. She’s really my wife.”

“Sometimes people prefer a private room if it’s really the Mrs.,” the voice continued.

“No, the public dining room will be quite adequate.”

“Only a few more questions,” the voice soothed. “Are you likely to be blind drunk when you come in for lunch?”

“Enough is enough,” Mash screamed. “Mash, the name is…”

“Not quite yet. Are you subject to gran mal seizures when you eat spicy foods?”

“No, no seizures,” Mash said.”

“Good,” the voice said comfortingly, “they are disturbing to the other customers. Will you be dressing formally or informally? We do not allow customers in shorts and sneakers.”

“That’s good to know. I will be wearing a suit,” Mash said, barely containing his rage.

“Will it be a man’s suit or a woman’s suit?” the voice asked. “Sometimes…”

“Up yours, you lunatic” Mash screamed and threw the phone to the floor resigning himself to the long snaking line.

“We’re going to have to wait a little while on line before lunch,” he told his wife as he was finishing off his coffee. Perhaps if he told her in advance she would not be as angry as she usually was when she had to wait to eat.

“Why don’t you call and make a reservation?” she asked. He handed her the card. “I’ve got to run,” he said. “why don’t you try it.”

As she dialed the number, Martin Mashes face brightened. She had less patience than he did. By the second question she would be furious. He loved to see her really angry at someone else. He was almost out the door so she would have to let her frustration out on the maid, or her hair dresser whoever came closest fastest. He was sorry he was not going to be around to see it. “I’ve got to run,” he said, lingering a moment to watch the look on her face.

She dialed the number on the card. “The name is Mash,” his wife offered. “There will be two of us for lunch. First seating. Thank you,” she said, and hung up.

“The pricks,” Martin Mash screamed to himself. “The fucking pricks. That was okay. They would get theirs in China.”

When he got to his office there was a note from Louise saying she would be late because she had something to do with the ‘you know what’. It took him a minute to figure out that the ‘you know what’ meant negligee. When she came in he would tell her that his wife was coming over and she should forget about the ‘you know what’ for the day and that tomorrow she could continue working on ‘she knew what’ again.

He made himself a pot of coffee and sat down to fantasize about being richer than he was now. He could keep the art scam alive. The only problem was finding another artist. He thought that perhaps he could find the girl again and see if he could talk her into finding another artist who would let her sell his paintings on the street for 20 dollars. Quality was a problem, of course. More important was finding an artist who would not rise from the dead as the last one had. A computerized lunatic asylum as a link in a chain of computerized lunatic asylums was an idea whose time had come. He could feel it in his bones. It would make a fortune for people like him who had gotten in at the beginning. Look at Mcdonalds. Look at…”

The thought was shattered as Triff, the Japanese and Tex burst into his office followed by three lawyers and Triff’s father’s fluzzy. The only thing that Martin Mash could think of was that something had gone wrong.

“Has anything gone wrong?” he burst out.

“Of course not,” Tex said. “Everything excellent,” the Japanese executive said cheerfully. “The papers are ready for signing,” Triff added.

“Where’s the check?”

“Here,” Triff said, holding out the check for Mash to read.

“Looks good to me,” Martin Mash said, “Where do I sign?”

“Four copies,” the Japanese man said.

Mash took out the Mont Blanc he used on special occasions. “One,” he said, as he tossed off his signature. He picked up the second set of papers. As he positioned the pen on the line that waited for his name, there was a knock on the door to his office. “Come in,” he said serenely.

A nightmare deposited itself in his office. Three men with fancy suits gripping piles of paper larger than the ones he had just signed came in first. They were followed by a crowd of people some wearing what looked like gas masks, others carrying nets. After them, the odd couple who had argued through two board meetings waltzed in.

“Who are you? What is this?” he shrieked.

“Are you Martin Mash?” one of the suited men asked. The men in the gas masks and nets milled around the room moving furniture, looking behind drapes and under the rug.

“Yes, I’m Mash. What’s going on?”

The couple who were arguing stopped for a moment so that they could hear the conversation.

“I have an order here authorizing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to conduct an environmental impact investigation pursuant to…”

“Never mind the citation,” Mash yelled. “What the hell are you…”

The female of the odd couple spoke up, her voice rising over the noise. “Any transfer of ownership and change of use of a facility occupying more than 2.2 acres requires a report on the environment effects of the change. Taber vs…”

“But…”

“O.K. men get ready to inspect,” one of the other suited men said.

“How long is this survey going to take,” Peter Triff asked the suited man who had been silent.

“In a place this size, mm, three days at the outside. That is if we don’t find anything that…”

Triff looked at the Japanese and Tex. His father’s fluzzy was gathering her things.

“We’ll see you in three days Mash,” Tex said ominously. “Just make sure nothing…”

At that moment Martin Mash’s wife walked through the door. “Martin,” she screamed, “what is going on.” In the commotion he had forgotten about lunch. “Nothing, darling,” he yelled to her over the heads of the people who filled the office. “This mob will all clear out in a moment.” He turned to Peter Triff. “Three days at the outside. Absolutely nothing to worry about,” he said. At that moment he heard Louise’s voice from just outside the office. It rose up and floated toward him in a warbling, sexy enticement. “It’s ready now, uncle Martin” and she walked through the door.

She had reduced the negligee to tassels and a G string. Her voluptuous body overwhelmed them. When she saw the crowd she stood stock still. The tassels fluttered gently over her nipples. She was a spectacular sight. All the movement in the office stopped. The men in the gas masks removed them and reached out to the men with the nets for support. Martin Mash saw his wife pivot and shoot out through the door. He could only stare at what was going to be denied him for ever. His troubles were supposed to be over but everything had gone horribly wrong.

Chapter 32

The virtuous whore is an invention of the virtuous pimp

Martin Mash crawled into bed and stayed there for three days. Under the covers he rediscovered superstition. Going to the office was a disaster. As long as he stayed away from the office bad things would not happen. Especially if he did not answer the phone, especially if he stayed in bed.

He had always thought about the phone as a friendly, reach-out-and-touch-someone-gently sort of machine. But spliced and fused to other machines, like Triff’s automatic dialer-forwarder, it had become a treacherous, diabolical instrument that reached out and grabbed you by the balls and squeezed mercilessly. His wife had gone to visit her mother in Duluth. Bed was the best place for him.

The rest did him good. Rationality seeped under the covers slowly, and returned to him bit by bit. By the fourth day, lying in bed became boring and silly.

Martin Mash shaved and returned to his office.

Taped to the office door was a note from Louise saying she quit because she didn’t think he was that kind of pervert.

“I mean,” she wrote, “a room full of men with gas masks and nets. I can understand the men in suits. I know some men like it in a group and I don’t object to a little bit of kink. But even though Vermeers is a mad house, enough is enough. Anyway,” she wrote, “I got a call from a nice man with a Texas twang who offered me a real job in a mall, or near a mall, or something that would develop into a mall. Your mail is on your desk.”

He shuffled through the letters. Advertisements for pornographic videos, discount coupons, convention announcements, contest offers and appeals from charities, covered his desk. He nudged them into the wastepaper basket and sat down and tried to remember what needed to be done. His mind drifted aimlessly from art to a lunatic asylum franchise and was preparing to navigate the negligee transformed into small tasseled pasties and a g string when the phone rang.

The first ring scuttled the fantasies. He supposed it was Triff.

“I’m speaking for the partnership now, not just me, Peter Triff. There better not be any trouble.”

“What more trouble could there be?”

“We can handle a few more days trouble at the outside. Any delay after that would cause problems for everyone. The Japanese are getting antsy. Tex needs to make an announcement so he can justify a new stock offering. We’re depending on you to carry out your end.”

“No problem,” Mash said just before Peter Triff hung up abruptly. “What more trouble could there be?”

The three days rest seemed to have left him hypersensitive to sounds. The knock on his door pulled him out of his seat.

“Yes.”

The EPA suits came in. They were holding a little cage in which insects were hopping around. “Spectacular!” one of them kept repeating, “spectacular.”

“What’s spectacular?” Mash asked, not sure he wanted to know.

“Two entirely new species of crickets. Here, in Monrow, can you imagine that? Here. In a rain forest you might encounter two new species of something. Even in some isolated Ozark mountain patch it wouldn’t be so spectacular. But here. Unbelievable.”

Mash heard unbelievable as a circumlocution for unbelievable trouble. “Will it delay…?”

“We are required by law to give prompt notice if we find anything that can severely hamper any plans for construction or deconstruction.” He placed a three-inch stack of paper on Mash’s desk. “The top sheet is a copy of the rules and regulations that specify what you can and can’t do with land on which new species of animals are found. If you want to keep them here, that is. Most people prefer that we move them,” the man said. “They find it more convenient than hiring a biologist of their own to take care of them. You want us to move them?”

Mash nodded.

“Then we’ll need only as long as it takes to collect all of the crickets,” another of the suited men said. “Figure two more weeks at the outside. Unless we discover some mysterious underground breeding ground. We have to be thorough. They seem to have materialized out of nowhere.”

Two weeks. A black hole of time, enough for every plan he and the partnership had made to be sucked into non existence.

“We’ll let you know as soon as we know,” the silent member of the trio burst out cheerfully.

“Yes,” Martin Mash said, “as soon as possible. Sooner.”

“Right,” the man said. “Under the top sheet are forms that you have to fill out and sign.”

“Why?”

“Oh, so we can move them. They say you accept responsibility for any damage that might occur in the removal process, they ask you to provide some information about the history of the land use, and ask personal questions.”

“What personal questions?”

“Oh, whether you ever saw any evidence of UFO’s in the area, whether you or people you are personally acquainted with fornicated on the ground in the vicinity, whether you or any other person using the land have any communicable diseases, stuff like that.”

Martin Mash looked at the pile of paper on his desk. “I see,” he said.

“We’ll be in touch,” the first of the suited men said as they left his office. “This is a very lovely place. Two weeks probably, no more.”

Mash realized that getting up was a mistake. He went back home and crawled into bed again. Perhaps he could sleep in peace.

It took four days this time for the tide of rationality to reach the isolated island on which he huddled, unshaven, wrapped in blankets, and carry him back to his office. As soon as he got to his office the phone rang.

“The Japanese have pulled out.”

“What. Who is this?” The voice sounded familiar but it had a tinny, empty echo to it.

“Triff. Tull is gone.”

“What. Triff. What do you mean Tull is gone?”

“He escaped, left the hospital.”

Martin Mash tried to remember who the hell Tull was. The details squished out of his hand as he grabbed for them. Tull, he vaguely remembered was a scientist, a patient in the hospital, that the Japanese wanted for some reason.

Mash remembered a detail. “What happened to the two patients the Japanese had in the hospital who were feeding them information?”

“Betrayed them,” Triff said. “Didn’t say a word. Just like Japs. Tull just took off.”

“How did they find out?”

“What?”

“How did the Japanese find out Tull was gone?”

“They sent some big gun scientist in to the hospital to try to talk to him. There was a great imitation of Tull on a chair, but he didn’t know squat about genetic engineering. They’ve pulled out. It’s your fault you fuck off. If we had been able to get on with it two weeks ago…”

“Can’t you get them back in?” Mash asked weakly. “Maybe he’s hiding somewhere at Vermeers.”

“They’re sure he’s left. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Someone leaked the story to the wall street crowd and their stock took a nosedive. They may not survive.”

Martin Mash was quiet for a moment then asked the question that could not be avoided. “Does that mean that the deal for Vermeers is off?”

“No. Tex and I talked. We can carry the piece the Japanese were going to cover. Things are still okay. What about the EPA?”

“Things are almost under control,” Martin Mash said, “only…”

“There’s no more ‘only’. No more,” Triff shouted unreasonably, “there’s only ‘things are done, period.’”

“Almost. It may be a few more weeks. Something has come up.”

Triff exploded. “You incompetent crap head. If we take any more time the whole thing may collapse. What’s come up?”

“Crickets,” Mash whispered, “Something about crickets. They found a new kind of crickets.”

“Mash you soft spined lump of crud, do something before the whole deal goes down the tubes,” and hung up.

Martin Mash decided to do something immediately. He went back home and crept into bed. He lay there staring at the ceiling whose minuscule irregularities became crickets which rubbed against one another sensuously and hopped around. It took him a long time to fall asleep and when he did he had a horrible series of nightmares. The absolute worst of them haunted him when he got up.

He was on a never ending escalator. Beside him people were going up as he was going down. They all glared at him. He tried to avoid their faces but could not. Each of them complained to him incoherently about something, usually the Crazy Man’s Ball but sometimes about crickets or negligees. He woke up in a sweat but when he fell back to sleep he was still on the escalator. It was horrible.

After that he fought going to sleep for two days because whenever he dozed he found himself back on the escalator again. After three more days under the covers he decided he could not afford to rest any more because he had not had a decent nights sleep all the time he was there because of the continuously running nightmare.

Perhaps there would be good news at his office. Perhaps the EPA was gone with the crickets. Perhaps Triff and Tex had started work on the mall. Perhaps the Chinese returned for the patients and swept the hospital clean of crazy people while he was trying to sleep. Perhaps the work on the mother franchise might have started. Perhaps in the second wing the shell of the restaurant would be left and perhaps he could scrounge in the kitchen and find something to eat. There would be no lines. He revived a little.

When he got to his office he opened the door slowly. Nothing had changed as far as he could see. The phone was silent. He decided to call Louise. Perhaps he could convince her to come back to work. He would offer to take her to lunch again. He would offer her a raise. He would guarantee no more than a small group of men in suits when she came in with the new negligee he would buy her. It was worth a call. When he picked up the phone to dial, Triff was on the line.

“Hello Mash. It’s Triff. Not really me, it’s an even newer telephone dialer-caller-grabber. The absolutely latest technology. It puts a permanently busy signal on your line and holds your line until you pick up this phone. After you get this message it will immediately place a call to me, to my beeper. I need to speak to you Mash, fast.”

Triff sounded tired. Mash heard the dialer snap and grind. An angry Peter Triff materialized on the line. “Mash you shit. We’re in trouble.”

“What trouble?”

“Tex has pulled out.”

“How could he pull out? A few crickets that’s all. Couldn’t he wait for a few crickets?” Mash whined. “We’re almost home free.”

“His wife,” Triff said in a low tone, “his wife.”.

“What’s his wife got to do with crickets? I thought his wife was boxed up.”

“She fired her lawyer, the lawyer that she thought was working for her but was really working for Tex and screwing her. She got three other lawyers. One of them is the guy who worked for you, Tiny. They got her out of the hospital immediately.”

“Impossible,” Mash said. “Tiny wasn’t a lawyer anymore. He was disbarred.”

“Well he was un-disbarred. I don’t know how you get un-disbarred but he and some crazy husband and wife team of lawyers showed up in court, got a release for the wife.”

Mash thought of his wife visiting her mother in Duluth. “So he’s saddled with his wife again. What does that have to do with crickets? Why should he pull out just because…?”

“It has nothing to do with crickets you shmuck. She’s suing him for all he’s worth. Her new lawyers started a humongous lawsuit. It was her money that Tex used to buy the malls. Now she wants it back with any profit he made over the last five years. Plus damages for locking her up in a lunatic asylum. The stocks in his corporation have plummeted.”

Mash held his breath. He was afraid to ask “are you still in?”

“I’m still in,” Triff volunteered. “We’re back to the original plan. It will take some work. My father’s floozy said she could come up with whatever money I needed. Asked for more control but I can manage her. She’s got the hots for me, I think,” he said. “But no more delays. Mash,” the young psychiatrist sounded desperate, “are they done with the crickets?”

“I don’t know,” Mash said. “I’ll find out this afternoon.”

“No more surprises,” Triff screeched in a barely controlled, wild voice. “I hate surprises. It’s time, already, our time.”

~~

“I have a surprise for you,” Strayte told Heirath as the liver man poured the two of them a drink. “The patients had a meeting.”

“I knew that,” Heirath said. He hated admitting he had been surprised more than he hated surprises. “About what?”

“I don’t know. They told me I didn’t have to go because of Helen. You seemed preoccupied by the Chinese.”

“I’m getting too old for this pre-suicide business. I can’t take any more surprises,” Heirath said to Strayte. “How is Helen doing?”

“Still a bit disoriented. She’s convinced that she recognized Billy and killed him because he raped her not because he was holding up a bank and had just killed her partner and had a gun aimed at her.”

“Did she?”

“What?”

“Kill him because he raped her.”

“Who knows? It may have helped to steady her aim,” Strayte said. “But if he hadn’t just shot Sam Waterston to death and wasn’t pointing a gun at her I doubt if she would have shot him—at least not just then.”

“She’s a hero,” Heirath said holding up the local paper. The headline read; HEROIC OFFICER KILLS ROGUE COP WHO SHOT PARTNER. There was Helen’s picture next to a blurb that asked, “Have you seen this woman?” The story speculated that she might have been kidnaped by an inside man, an Indian, who was angry at her breaking up the robbery.

Strayte shrugged. “She’s not ready to face the press yet, or anyone who’s not a lunatic in Vermeers.”

“Well,” Heirath said feigning disinterest, “while you have been playing doctor things have been happening fast and furiously. What was the score when you were paying attention last?”

“I don’t remember exactly. The hospital had been sold to Triff and the other bad guys.”

“Well the other bad guys are out. It’s only Triff now.”

“How did you manage that?”

“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” Dr. Heirath said peevishly.”The Japanese lost Tull and Tex got his wife back.”

“I don’t understand,” Strayte said. “But don’t try to explain it even if you can,” he added quickly. “Just tell me if it means we’re out of the woods?”

“No,” Dr.Heirath mumbled, “nothing has really changed at all. We’re still knee deep in shit. The Chinese went away on a shopping trip but when they come back the patients are going to be shipped to Yunnan.”

“That I remember,” Strayte said.

“Emily and Emile got Tex’s wife out of the hospital and then they started a lawsuit against him. He’s done for. But they haven’t been able to come up with anything that will hold Triff off any more after the environmental law suit,” Heirath continued. “When the crickets are gone…”

Strayte held his head tightly. “Maybe discharging the patients as cured would be best all way round,” Strayte said. “They could take the money the businesses have earned and…”

“All the money they’ve made might get them a months care at CTTL,” Heirath commented. “ One month. None of them could function outside of an institution. A few maybe. They need a cocoon around them.”

“Not like us,” Strayte said with a voice sotted with irony. “They do need some insulation from the world though. Vermeers provided it. I don’t know…”

“Neither do I,” Leonard Mittleman said, as poked his head through the door with a worried look on his face. “The figures don’t add up and I can’t figure out why. My calculations went off somewhere.”

“How much is there in the patients account?” Dr. Heirath asked.

“5200 dollars.”

Strayte looked at Heirath. “I thought there was $48,000. How was it possible to loose that much so fast.”

“No, there was a million eight.”

“A million eight.” Strayte was incredulous. “A million what eight?”

“A Million eight hundred thousand dollars. After the puts were settled. That was before El Mexico though.”

“Before what?” Heirath winced.

El Mexico sounded like the name of a horse. “You didn’t bet it on the ponies?” Strayte asked.

Leonard Mittleman looked at him as if he was crazy. “I’m sorry we didn’t keep in touch more but there were so many details. I made a mistake somewhere. I might not be a businessman after all. I mean it might be a delusion. I’ve been dreaming a lot recently. The other life,” he added quickly.

“Look,” Strayte said sympathetically, hoping he could soften the personal consequences of mistakes the gentle businessman had made. He felt a little guilty about urging the acting administrator to keep Leonard Mittleman in his delusion when he wanted to shed it. “Dreams are dreams. Forget about them,” he said. “You’re a businessman, take my word for it.”

“Thank you,” the businessman said, “That’s nice to hear.”

“But maybe you better back up and fill us in,” Heirath said, offering the businessman a drink.

“Not for me, I’ve got some work still to do,” Mittleman said. “Okay, a quick financial report. The bottom line, more or less. Well, there was 59,021 dollars in the patients’ account as of a few weeks ago. From the businesses,” he said. “Murdoch and I talked it over then we bought very short term puts against Nagahusi Chemical and Tex’s Mall Corp.”

“You did what?”

“Bought puts. Besides the cash we used the hospital as collateral. I hope you don’t mind, we used your name,” he said to Heirath. “We were going to ask for your permission but then this business with Dr. Tull came up and the crickets and the EPA. We had to make a quick decision and you seemed preoccupied with the Chinese.”

“A million eight,” Heirath mumbled and licked the rim of the glass he was holding.

“We don’t have the least idea what you are talking about,” Strayte said speaking for the doctor whose face had suddenly become ashen and puckered with confusion.

“Oh. well,” Mittleman said, warming to his novice audience. “There were rumors on the street that Nagahusi Chemical was getting an infusion of new talent that would allow them to complete the project they had bet the family jewels on. Everyone was waiting for the rumors to firm up a bit before they gorged themselves on the stock, only we knew that it was going to flop.”

“How did we know that?” Strayte asked.

“Mr. Cricket. Dr. Tull. The Japanese thought they were going to get Tull. Only we knew they weren’t so we bought short term puts. Then when Mr. Cricket disappeared the rumors stopped and Murdoch put in a call to the Wall Street Journal suggesting that the project was dead and the Japanese couldn’t deny it and their stock trembled and shuttered and went down the tubes entirely and we made…$1,161,000.”

“Then we did the same thing with Tex’s stock because we knew Emile and Emily were going to file that law suit against Tex for false imprisonment and the suit asked for punitive damages of everything that Tex owned and when his stock fell we made…$639,000 and change. Numbers are a pain,” he said.

“We didn’t own any Nagahusi stock or any of Tex’s stock did we?” Heirath managed to cough out.

“Of course not,” Leonard Mittleman said gleefully. “We went into the market naked, stark, cold naked.”

“So how come there is only $5200 or so in the current patient account,” Strayte asked very tentatively. The history of the stock transactions confused him thoroughly, but if the money had been lost, it made no difference into which hole it had disappeared.

“Oh it cost a million two for El Mexico.”

“El Mexico?” Strayte wheezed.

“And $100,000 for assorted fees and papers and things, and another $200,000 for furnishing and computers and the telephone lines and the crew, except for the cooks because we had our own.”

“Telephone lines?” the Doctor whimpered.

“Not really telephone lines, some sort of satellite connection. The latest technology.”

“What is El Mexico?” Strayte shouted.

“A ship.”

“What ship?” Dr. Heirath inquired, sucking the last of his drink and reaching for the bottle.

“The ship, El Mexico. We had a meeting.”

“Who’s we?”

“The patients. Actually we met as staff. It seemed more appropriate. You were so busy we didn’t want to bother you with anything that didn’t have to do with running the hospital or the Chinese or Helen. At first we thought we could buy another place like Vermeers, in Mexico. There was this place for sale. I remembered it vaguely from somewhere. The computer person made a direct connection and Murdoch and I dickered through the linguist a little bit and we bought it.”

“A ship?”

“No, we thought we bought this hacienda with a beach in Mexico that had been used as a mental hospital because it had room for 400 people and had an auditorium but…”

“There was a mistake,” Strayte said.

“Yes, we bought a ship called El Mexico. It’s in dry dock Argentina. The cruise ship company that built it bellied up just before it hit the water. There was a computer glitch and I wasn’t as careful as I should have been about details and the connection wasn’t good. It was a steal.”

“You did what,” Heirath asked as if he had suddenly awakened in the middle of a bad dream.

“We bought a ship. After we talked it over we decided it wasn’t a mistake at all. I mean it was originally a mistake but then it turned out not to be a mistake at all. We wanted it to be a surprise. We want you and nurse G and the doctor to come with us of course. Helen too, if she wants,” Leonard Mittleman said to Strayte. “China seems so distant, so alien. On a boat we could have a restaurant and at every port we came to we could put an advertisement in the local newspapers and stay a week or so. And we could keep the telephone hot line because we could get an international 900 number so people could make international calls and it they wouldn’t know the difference and the computer correspondence school which was going great guns and the art gallery which changed its name to the International Gallery of Different Styles.”

“Wait,” Strayte said, exhausted from the frenzied spin through the peculiar warp in space and time in which the weird action had taken place. “Let me see if I have this right. The patients of Vermeers bought a cruise liner called El Mexico from a defunct cruise company in Bolivia with money you made speculating in stocks of a japanese pharmaceutical firm and an American Mall developer…”

“Argentina, Buenos Aires to be exact,” Mittleman corrected.

“…so that you could start a floating restaurant, art gallery, call in hot line and computer correspondence school with money you made from playing the stock market.”

“Not start,” Mittleman interjected,” internationalize the basis of operations of the businesses we have going now, Chez Verms and the gallery and the hot line. For the time being the boutique and the book store will have to stay put I’m afraid. All businesses are international now, almost all of the successful ones. It would be a very modern concept, especially for lunatics.”

“Even for the staff of mental hospitals,” Strayte added.

“We were going to surprise you,” the businessman said. “At the celebration tonight.”

“What celebration?” Strayte asked hollowly.

“We are going to have a party at the restaurant. Eight o’clock. It’s formal more or less. The boutique is supplying the dresses and tuxedos. You will come?”

“I’m sure we’ll be there,” Strayte said thoughtfully. He relaxed and s looked at Heirath who was rubbing his liver. He had a far away look in his eye. It was too much. “ The acting administrator and I will certainly come.”

“And Helen and Nurse G too,” Leonard Mittleman said enthusiastically, “it should be a fun party.”

“Of course,” Strayte added.

“You are going to come with us to El Mexico aren’t you?”

Strayte looked at the doctor who was completely drained. “We’re going to have to think about it a little while,” Strayte said.

The acting administrator started as if something had startled him. “How are you going to get there?” he asked. “I mean all of the patients?”

“We’ve chartered an airplane the only problem now is passports. We were going to send in applications but…it’s complicated. John John has his computer talking to the State department’s computer but they don’t quite speak the same language yet. We want to get out before the Chinese come back. China…”

“Is far away,” Dr. Heirath sighed, “I’m sure it will work out.”

“I hope so. Everyone would really be disappointed if we couldn’t go. We have decided that we all go or none of us go.”

“I can see how that might be a problem,” Strayte said.

“Well,” Leonard Mittleman said, “I’ve got to be running. There’s still a lot of work to be done. Details, details. I’ll see you tonight.”

“Sure,” Nick Strayte said. “Tonight.”

Chapter 33

People who demand the impossible may be satisfied with the improbable but he who asks for what he can not have must settle for what he is not likely to get

For a while neither Strayte nor Heirath said anything. Strayte stared at his foot. The whorls of abrasions that decorated his shoe caught his attention. He noticed that they resembled a flying figure with a cape or a cricket or a distorted E depending on how he tilted his foot. He tried to think about the unlikely sequence of rasps and scrapes could have produced that particular pattern.

The acting administrator stuck his finger in his empty glass and squeegeed it around the circumference and carried the last drop of whisky balanced on his fingertip to his lips.

The whirlwind trip they had taken over an impossible, insane terrain depleted them and left them exhausted. Strayte assured himself that it entitled them to rest mindlessly and not think about anything at all. He let himself unfold on the chair.

The acting administrator had pleated the parts of him that were not absolutely essential and let the others hang slack.

“Can we avoid talking about it?” Strayte asked.

“If we really try?” the acting administrator asked?” No. You just made sure of that. I was willing to let it go until I got some more whiskey. That’s what wrong with Sociologists,” he complained. “They just can’t let a sleeping dog just lay there. They have got to force their fingers into its mouth just to see if it will bite.”

“Forget what I just said,” Strayte insisted. “Forget it. I just wasn’t thinking. I’m confused.”

“Me too,” Heirath echoed.

“Do you believe it?” Strayte asked.

“I don’t know,” the acting administrator said. “It’s unbelievable. It’s really crazy. It’s about the craziest thing that happened at Vermeers since I’ve been here, if it’s true. What do you think?”

“Maybe it only seems insane,” Strayte said. “Maybe it only seems insane because it happened here, in a lunatic asylum. Maybe things like that happen in the ordinary, everyday world all the time. The market is indifferent to who buys the puts. Maybe everyday someone gets up and makes a million eight on some absolutely insane scheme and buys a beached cruise liner and sails off and no one but his accountant and the IRS notices. There are insane things happening all the time all over the place,” he suddenly decided, “we just don’t notice. Computers, genetic engineering, instant communication, child abuse, mass murder, bottled water, raising the dead, cash machines. Big quaint, insane things. Each of our lives is composed of an unlikely sequence of absolutely improbable events. The unbelievable occurs regularly but no one believes it.”

“What is a put?” Heirath asked. Then he changed his mind. “No, don’t tell me. I retract the question. I think it’s true,” he said scratching himself.

“I think so too, Strayte said. “Why would Leonard lie to us? He likes us, he respects our sanity. He wouldn’t lie. Maybe about the million eight, not about the cruise ship. Or, maybe about the cruise ship but not about the million eight. Not about both. I wish Murdoch had told us. He’s more sensitive to things that are true but seem like lies because they’re so improbable.

“El Mexico. It has a nice ring to it. It’s insane,” the doctor said letting his voice rise only a very little when he said insane. “A ship, a ship of fools in Buenos Aires.”

Strayte stared at his shoe.”Maybe there was a mistake, a real mistake.”

The doctor shrugged. “If there was, I’m not sure they were the ones who made it. We lost control.”

“If we ever had it. Control is an illusion. I was just beginning to think….We were under an illusion that madness was contained and under control,” Strayte recited, “that we controlled it. Then madness broke out and confronted the real world and vanquished it. Poor Mash, poor Triff. They didn’t have a chance. You and I were innocent bystanders.”

“Not so innocent.”

“Not so innocent is true. What happens when we stop running?” Strayte said suddenly.

“A crack opens up in the earth beneath our feet and swallows us up and we fall down to the opposite end of the earth, to China. We lose,” Heirath said.

“Losing isn’t the worst thing that can happen,” Strayte said suddenly.

“What’s the worst thing that can happen?” Heirath asked.

“Becoming like Mash, like Triff, like them.”

“Like them?” Heirath repeated absent mindedly. “Yesterday, when I was trying to find Yunnan on the map,” Heirath said slowly, pointing with his head in the direction of the colored square on the wall, “I thought of calling Pinkham College. Perhaps they never filled the position.”

“You could try,” Strayte said, tilting his shoe so that it caught the light. “You’d have a warm friendly place to pre-suicide in, young livers, a lot of distractions.”

“You?” Heirath asked.

“Me?” Strayte said, jiggling his foot. “Maybe I’ll change my name.” His mind wandered and turned home. “The crank calls, making up a new vita, looking for another job somewhere, probably a community college, no tenure, no associate professorship, no book tantalizingly waiting to be published…”

“You should have thought about that before…”

“I told you I didn’t molest her. She…”

“I’m sorry I raised the issue. Either way it’s a touchy topic.”

“Not either way. I’m innocent.”

“So am I but I still feel ashamed. I’m not sure she meant what she said about forgiving me.”

“Who?” Strayte asked.

“My wife, who else,” Heirath answered sharply, “when she was dying. I think my pre-suicide was a fraud. Cowardice. I never…”

“The dead have nothing but time on their hands,” Strayte said absent mindedly. “I’ll tell you what,” he added, shifting direction. “We’ll go to the party tonight and celebrate. Helen and Nurse G will be beautiful. We can get drunk and forget. Maybe afterward…who knows. Then tomorrow we can commit suicide.”

“Are you crazy,” Heirath shouted as if he had been stuck with a needle.

“Just checking,” Strayte said, “just checking. Why don’t you go with the patients?” Strayte asked.

“Why don’t you?” the acting administrator shot back defensively. “They invited us all,” he reminded him.

“I might,” said Strayte. “Being a college professor isn’t the fun it was before. Like the job of acting assistant administrator, it wouldn’t have lasted long anyway. Computers are going to come in and strip mine the universities like those diabolical leviathans they use to rip coal out of the earth. No one sitting on their fat tenures seems to understand what’s going to happen. Why don’t you go with them?”

The acting chief medical officer was meditative. “There’s more to life than pre-suicide, of course. But I don’t know that I’ve pre-suicided long enough. How can you tell that enough of something is enough. Besides, Nurse G. hasn’t made up her mind what she wants to do if the hospital closes.”

“It’s something to think about.”

“What about Helen?”

“No, she’s made up her mind to go back. After things settle down she’s going to quit the police force and return to school to get a Ph.D. Her father will just have to live with it”

“That’s good.”

“Yes, it is,” Strayte said with some enthusiasm, “but I was hoping she’d stay a little longer.”

“Like you.”

Strayte shrugged. “Have I overstayed my welcome?”

“If we weren’t closing permanently,” the acting administrator said, “I’d offer you a permanent position. Assistant administrator. I like you Nick.”

“If the hospital wasn’t closing permanently, I would think about it,” Strayte said seriously. “I like you too, John.”

Strayte got up. Part of his body was still caught in some other space. He was drenched in sweat. “I’ll go tell Helen about the party and see if she is up to going tonight. You better ask Nurse G.” He pulled himself up to go up to the ward. Three Chinese barred the door.

“You are administrator?” one asked.

“I am acting, assistant administrator. The man you want is there,” he said pointing to Heirath whose head was beginning to droop. “He is tired but he is acting administrator. He is also acting chief medical officer and acting chief psychiatrist.”

The man jammed in the right of the doorway rattled in Chinese as the man in the middle translated. “Esteemed colleague. We came back early. Ran out of money. Incomplete buying trip. Pleased to meet you Dr. who?”

“Dr. Heirath. You are…”

“I am Big Wong, at left is Little Wong. In center translator.” He barked something in Chinese, and the two men to his left shuffled and twisted and broke the log jam.

Strayte tried to think of something relevant to ask the three men. Their timing was horrible. Neither he nor Heirath was in any condition to deal with them. He panicked. Even if the patients managed to get passports tomorrow, they were in deep shit. Mash would try to send them to China out of spite. Since Triff was the responsible psychiatrist he might be able to pull it off. “How was your trip?”

“We have diplomatic passports,” Big Wong said, very depressed.

“Your trip was a disappointment,” Dr. Heirath asked, trying to think if there was any thing that he could come up with that could keep Mash from carrying out his plan to export the patients like so much produce.

“No, trip was wonderful. America is a wonderful and beautiful country. Everything for sale. We bought a great deal to send to China. Great possibilities to do business.”

“So why are you so depressed?” Strayte asked.

“Would like to stay. But impossible. We must return.”

“You want to stay?”

“Yes, want to stay,” Big Wong said, “but impossible. Ran out of money. No money, no business. No business then must return to China to build up nest eggs again. Hopeless. We are ready to take patients.”

“What’s the big rush?” Strayte asked. “You could stay here a few days, relax. We can show you the hospital. You could shop in the Boutique at no charge, eat free at the restaurant. No problem for a few days.”

“Appreciate your offer,” Little Wong replied. “A possibility for a few days, but faster we return, faster start accumulation process.”

“It’s a shame,” Strayte said. “In a few days we might have been able to figure out a way of letting you stay permanently.”

“Stay,” Big Wong repeated, “how could we stay?”

“Oh,” Strayte said, “you could ask for asylum. You could say that if you returned home they were going to shoot you for making too much free enterprise and not enough psychiatry. That’s always appealing to Americans. If that didn’t work the doctor there in his capacity of acting chief psychiatrist could certify that traveling around the United States made you temporarily crazy. Emile and Emily could take your case. They’re very good lawyers.”

“None of it true,” Big Wong said. “We working on commission from higher ups. And desire to stay shows not insane.”

“You know that and I know that and I’m sure the good doctor here suspects the truth, but the U.S. government is an innocent who does not know any of it. And if you stay, you can run the businesses here at the hospital. They’re quite profitable. You could take orders from the China using faxes and computers. It would take you only a couple of weeks to build up a nice nest egg and if you play the market…” He bit his tongue.

“What kind of businesses?”

“A restaurant, a boutique that sells clothing and furniture, a computer school.”

“Dr. Ting knows computers. He talked to computers before became psychiatrist. Dr. Li run restaurant on side in Kunming while he worked at the Red Cross Hospital. Possibilities. But passports, but patients to China?” Big Wong held out the passports.

“Let us worry about that,” Strayte said, taking the passports from the large psychiatrists hands. His own hands were trembling but he was starting to get a second wind. The world was mad. The passports were just another reminder if he needed one that chaos ruled everywhere—impartially, but with a strict hand. “Meanwhile you are all invited to a celebration tonight.”

“Celebration of what?” the translator asked.

“Of your becoming temporary citizens, El Mexico, anything you want to celebrate,” Dr. Heirath said. “Find yourself rooms. Even numbered rooms are empty, you know two, four, six…”

“We know even numbers,” Little Wong said.

“Welcome to Vermeers. Make yourselves at home. Think about it as your asylum in America,” the acting administrator said.

Strayte caught the acting administrator’s eye. Heirath winked an exhausted wink at him. Madness had won again.

~~

By the time Strayte and Helen got to the farewell party there it was in full swing. The patients had taken over the third wing ballroom and recreated an improved Crazy Man’s Ball. It was spectacular.

Dr. Heirath strutted in a splendid set of tails. “I’ve always wanted to wear tails. I wore them once,” he said, as he paraded up and down in front of Nurse G swinging his rear so the tails fluttered, “at my daughter’s wedding. But I hardly moved and didn’t eat because I worried about tearing or staining them.”

Nurse G had foresworn her army dress uniform for a long pastel yellow gown. Her looks which were always muffled and contorted by the nurse’s uniform she wore on the ward were liberated by the dress. Strayte was impressed.

The patients had foraged over the decades lying cradled in the donations stored in the basements for the most elegant dresses and formal suits they could find.

In the corner a juke box rolled hit after hit of decade after decade.

“Where did you get the Juke box?” Strayte asked a patient resting on the wall basking in the neon glow of the machine.

“Oh it was the Piddlestroms who donated it. I remember when he had it in the restaurant. Then they got a later model and it went to the hospital. 1962 I think.”

“What took you so long?” Dr. Heirath asked. “We thought you might have gotten lost.”

“No, we went for a walk.”

They had explored the domain of Vermeers. For all of the frenetic activity of the EPA the grounds were remarkably undisturbed. “It’s lovely here,” Strayte said.

“Yes, and peaceful. It may be the only peaceful spot left in the world, at least in the city,” Helen remarked. “Every other place with this much grass is either a golf course or an amusement park, or filled with tourists who thought they found a grassy spot until the other tourists came. I’d love to stay.”

“Then stay,” Strayte said. “You don’t really have to be crazy to stay. Not even pretend crazy like me.”

“No. It’s artificial.”

Strayte made a face.”It’s so artificially crazy that it’s artificially sane. The grass and the trees don’t know from crazy. It’s just that it’s not real sanity, not the kind of real sanity that gets me fired and you shooting….” He hesitated.

“That’s our kind of craziness Nick, you know that. It’s the craziness that passes as normal, the only kind of sanity that we have out there. We can change it a little, we can even pick a spot and make it less crazy but we can’t escape here, into a madhouse for sanity, peace and forgiveness.”

“You’re right,” Strayte said. You’ve been right since the first time I saw you.” He reached out and drew her close.”

“It’s getting late,” Helen said after a while. “We should get back. I haven’t even gotten a dress yet. We’ll miss the party.”

Helen went looking for the dress she had worn to the Crazy Mans Ball but it was not on the racks. She was disappointed. “I loved that dress,” she sighed to Strayte. “It was the exactly the dress I always imagined dressing up in as a child.”

“Wait a minute,” May said, and went into the back and got it for her. “Dr. Strayte asked me to put it away after the Crazy Mans Ball. He said no one looked as beautiful…”

Strayte blushed. “I thought…”

Helen looked at him. “You’re a romantic. I wouldn’t have believed it.”

“In a madhouse people change.”

She kissed him lightly. “It was very nice.”

He selected a tuxedo with wide lapels that made him look like a master of ceremonies on a T.V. quiz show. “You look elegant,” Helen complimented him. “Well it is the last cotillion that Vermeers will probably have and the first real Crazy Mans Ball.”

The dinner was a buffet.

“Pierre has really gone all out for this,” Strayte commented to Heirath after they had exhausted themselves dancing. “It’s not his usual fare.”

“It’s all Mexican,” Heirath said. “They experimented a little.” There were beans and mole and piles of roasted chicken parts. The carcass of a barbecued pig lay on the table its meat reconstructed on its body. Great bowls of guacamole and mounds of miniature tortillas were heaped on plates. A large bowl of flan shimmered on the table under the Pinata that hung from the ballroom ceiling.

Pierre got up on the table with his sous chefs. “I hope you enjoy the food. We have expanded our menu you see. On El Mexico it would not do to just carry our old menu. And we have something special”, he added. From a door off to the side two of the Chinese psychiatrists dressed in chefs uniforms came out with dim sum and dumplings. Everyone applauded.

At the corner of the table Leonard Mittleman had cornered the market in the non-Mexican food. “Some people prefer the old menu, he said to Strayte, “the vitamins. Just keeping my hand in. You never can tell,” he said. “By the way. I wanted to talk to you about something. I had this dream last night not exactly a dream. It was a something between a dream and a memory. I went home. You remember what I told you when we were thinking about setting up the businesses. I’m afraid what I was afraid of was true. I’m not a businessman at all. I remembered. I was a clerk, the real me, a clerk in a shoe store. I just read too many books about becoming rich, and watched too much late night shows about doing business. I’m afraid…” He waited for Strayte to say something.

“Look Leonard,” Strayte said. “Whatever life you launched yourself into craziness from, whatever mistakes you made, you’ve done enough real business here to make you a genuine businessman. Dreams are dreams. I don’t know shit about business but let me tell you something about reality. It’s a connection between what you believe and what you do. The reality is you pulled off a one million dollar market killing. You helped five businesses start and flourish. If that doesn’t make you a real businessman I don’t know what would.”

“You know,” Leonard Mittleman said, “I guess you’re right. I wasn’t a businessman before but I am now. I guess that makes me sane, doesn’t it?”

“It cerrtainly does,” Strayte said smearing the ambiguity. “Only go a little easy from now on the short term puts. Sanity can be intoxicating at first. Take it slow.”

“I will,” the businessman said, “I sure will. I can let you have two hamburgers if you want for one of whatever that is that you’re not eating.”

“No,” Strayte said, “thanks but I’ll stick with what I have.”

“Okay, but think about it before you eat too much,” he said and drifted off.

“Are you going to go with them Nick?” Helen asked as they were doing the fox trot to a slow rhumba.

“I was thinking, we…” Strayte said.

“It’s too easy…I’m not whole enough yet to…” Helen said as she turned.

“Anyway, I would just be in the way. What do they need an assistant administrator for, or a sociologist, on a ship of fools.”

“They need someone though. If you went you could observe, that’s what sociologists do, don’t they?”

“I’ve lost my taste for it,” he said.

“What will you do?”

“I haven’t decided. The hearings on the sexual harassment charges at the college start in a few days. That means I have a few days to decide. I may go back and try to defend myself. I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right to go down for something I didn’t do when there were so many things I could have gone down for that I did. And what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Go back clear up this Billy thing. Afterwards I want to go to graduate school, to get a Ph.D. in literature or philosophy.”

“Well we could share libraries,” he said, swirling her around in a fox trot break as the marimbas sang.

She looked at him.”If you don’t decide to go on el Mexico I might take you up on the offer,” she said. “I…”

When the dance ended, he kissed her gently. “We can talk about the future, later.”

The linguist had gathered the patients in a large group and was teaching them Spanish. “You’ve got to think in Spanish,” he said. “Ustedes tienen que pensar en Espanol. Yo soy mexicana o mexicano,” he yelled.

“I soy mexicano,” someone repeated, “no soy loco.”

“Isn’t that Dr. Tull?” Heirath asked Strayte as they watched a distinguished looking man going around shaking hands with the other patients. He was wearing a wig and a false nose.

“It looks like him,” Heirath said. They pushed their way toward the man who was circulating quickly among the patients.”

“Dr. Tull.”

“I just wanted to say goodbye.”

“Isn’t it a little dangerous?” Strayte said. “The Japanese.”

“Oh, the Japanese. They have a lot to learn about genetic engineering and disguises. I wanted to say goodbye. I don’t know if you two are going with the patients, but whatever happens I wish you well. Excuse me, I want to try to say goodby to everyone.”

“Of course, Heirath said. “I liked the old man,” he said to Strayte as Tull moved on.

“The old Nobel prize man,” Strayte said. “Personally he’s sweet. But if he has his way with the world our asses will glow like fireflies and the lunatic asylums will turn out to have been bastions of sanity.”

When Dr.Tull finished saying good bye, Strayte watched him walk to the corner and stand for a while and change into Mr. Chameleon.

Strayte walked up to him.

“That was a nice thing to do.” Mr. Chameleon was standing in a way that reminded Strayte of a postman. “Oh he asked me to do it. He called and asked if I wouldn’t say goodbye to everyone for him. It was the least I could do for the crickets.”

“You were a very good Tull.”

“Oh yes,” Mr. Chameleon said. “He was very nice and very easy. How do I look now?”

“Very real, very authentic. Someone I don’t know?” Strayte asked.

“Me. I’m practicing me,” Mr.Chameleon said, “I’m glad to see it’s convincing.”

“Very convincing, really very convincing,” Strayte said.

All of the Chinese except the two who were practicing cooking were sitting in chairs along the side of the room looking very uncomfortable.

Strayte walked up to Big Wong. “You look uncomfortable.”

“No,” Big Wong said, “Thinking.”

“About what?”

“About spices for restaurant, about wholesaling T.V.’s. lots of little things, and my home town.”

“You’ve got to learn to relax a little. Mingle.”

“Mingle?”

“Yes,” Strayte said, “in America at parties people dance and talk.”

“To strangers,” Big Wong asked, “to people you don’t know, who aren’t even from your hometown?”

“Yes,” Strayte said. “It’s the American way. If you are going to be patients here you might as well get used to American ways.”

“I guess so,” Big Wong agreed and got up and issued an order to the Chinese strung out in the row of chairs. They looked bewildered. Finally a few of them asked some of the others to dance.

“Well it’s a start,” Strayte said, “it’s a start.”

When Murdoch the accountant got up, Pierre struck a spoon on the punch bowl and everyone got quiet.

“We of the organizing committee”—John John and May got up and moved to his side and were applauded—”would like to ask the acting administrator and the acting assistant administrator to say something.”

Dr. Heirath shook his head vigorously but Nurse G pushed him up to the front of the ballroom.

“Well I hope you all take care of your livers in Mexico. Mexico can be hell on livers. You’ve survived Dr. Triff and you’ve survived Martin Mash and you made enough money to sail off on El Mexico. When you sail back here, I hope you visit me and Nurse G and Nick Strayte and Helen wherever we are. I thought Vermeers was going to be a prelude to a suicide but you made it something else. I thank you for it.” He scrambled to his seat.

“Dr. Strayte.”

“I’m not sure…”

“Oh, say anything,” May said. “You’re a professor. You intellectuals got a load of bullshit for any occasion.”

“I haven’t been here as long as some of you,” Strayte began, “as most of you I guess. I’ve learned a lot about being sane from all of you, I really have,” he said. “Nurse G taught me how important order is, even the disorderly order of being insane. Each of you taught me something too. Mr. Chameleon taught me how important it is to really look at people you meet, really see them. He showed me what you can do if you pay attention to the people you meet. It was an interesting lesson for a sociologist to learn.”

“Leonard Mittleman taught me that the worth of something so small as a bun or a Mont Blanc pen without a nib was fluid and negotiable, and depended on how much effort you put into discovering its value. May taught me how to pick out a suit of clothes that fit. I look and listen to computers a lot differently since John John taught me that communicating with anything was as much display of our limitations as it was an exercise in our freedom. Dr. Tull taught me the future was open in ways I never thought much about. I learned something about how far humans could push into our very substance itself if only you persisted single mindedly.”

“My good friend Dr. John Heirath taught me the value of trying, of holding the world at a distance before you brought it close and felt its liver and kissed it. He taught me that doing good was a struggle and that chaos could be prodded and poked if it couldn’t be controlled.”

“Vermeers taught me something too. Vermeers never cured anyone that I know of. But it stopped making people crazier than they were. Vermeers gave me a space to be crazy when I needed to be crazy and a little space to be a little less crazy when I could afford the luxury of a little sanity. It showed me there were a lot of different ways to be crazy even some that passed as being sane. Some of them made a lot of money and some of them didn’t make anything but pain. For some kinds of craziness you get rewarded and people pin medals on you and you get to run the hospital. And for other kinds of craziness they take you out behind the shed and beat the living shit out of you.”

He looked at Helen radiant in her dress. She looked like she was taking mental notes. “Craziness measures a distance between disorders. You are going to sail out into the sane world. Before you do, you should know some things. The sane world is going a little mad. Things are changing so fast that none of us, sane or mad, knows who we are anymore, what gender, what sex, none of us knows what disease will ripple between us, what hybrid machines, half computer, half flesh, will change our lives. No one can know who we will become by the time we become what we are changing into. Some of us hear voices when there are no people speaking…” A few patients held up their hands and waved them. “But a lot of sane people don’t hear voices when people are speaking to them and I’m not sure that’s not a worse kind of craziness.

“Everything is up for grabs. Dr. Tull saved our hides by making a cricket with a firefly’s tail. Who knows when we start to muck around with the very substance of our being what we will become, what we will carve out of our substance itself. The massive kind of change all of us, sane or insane, are experiencing, change so swift it has escaped the pull of the human gravity that set it on its course and kept it in a human orbit is a kind of craziness. We have brought chaos and randomness into our lives because we believed we could harness them and they would drive our future. We accepted chaos and disorder because we believed they were the price of a new order of sanity. Perhaps somewhere there is another new order being born. But on the horizon there is only disorder with which you are so familiar. And it will get worse. We in Vermeers are a little crazy, its true. Some of us are a lot crazy. But we are healthy crazies who have just burst their seams. But if our thought is disoriented none of us are cannibals, none of us hide little kids in dungeons none of us collect in the basements of dark fortresses and try and raise the dead. As you sail out on the ocean on El Mexico keep a warm spot in you hearts for the rest of us also on some ship of fools, inventing new logics, new species, new people, new thought.”

There was sporadic applause.

“Could Mr. Chameleon explain what you just said to us,” one of the celebrants yelled out from the back of the ballroom.

“Don’t bother,” Strayte said, “forget it. Enjoy El Mexico.”

The accountant got up again. “Thank you Dr. Heirath and Dr. Strayte. We want to thank you for treating us as persons. In recognition of what you have done for us we would like to present you with a few tokens of our appreciation.

Mr. Chameleon stood up and imitated the host at the last Academy awards celebration.

“For Dr. Heirath who started out studying livers and ended up studying people the mid-year change of life award for going the greatest distance with the greatest weight on his shoulder. With that award goes a certificate showing that he has graduated from the pre-suicide phase of his life and a copy of Harold’s new book Pre sanity: Living a sane life to the fullest.”

“To Dr. Strayte goes the ‘Crazy Sociologist’ award. Every sociologist is crazy a little but he was crazy a lot in just the ways a sociologist should be crazy. And because he came into the hospital crazy we have a discharge signed by the good Dr. Administrator—he gave him the scrap of paper the doctor had signed as an IOU to Leonard Mittleman. And we would also like to assure him that we believe in his innocence and would award him tenure on the El Mexico if he ever wants it. “

The patients applauded.

“And now the finale,” Mr. Chameleon said, taking on the appearance of a postman. He reached down and picked up the pole that was lying near his feet. “Nurse G will you do the honors. Nurse G stood up and Leonard Mittleman blindfolded her. “Try to hit the pinata, Nurse G. Try.” Nurse G took the pole firmly in her hands and swung wildly. “Close, Nurse G, close,” Mr. Chameleon sang out. She swung chaotically, in wild disorderly chops, the stick carving the air in disordered arcs. Heirath got up and moved behind her carefully and guided her toward the swinging paper mache vessel she was trying to hit until a random blow stuck and smashed it. It broke into pieces and the Chinese diplomatic passports came fluttering down.

“El Mexico, el Mexico,” the staff of Vermeers screamed in delight, “el Mexico.”

Nurse G kissed Dr. Heirath. “Congratulations. And congratulate me. Yesterday I dreamed of Vermeers and it was so peaceful,” she said. “You’re a miracle worker Dr. Heirath.”

The linguist translated her remarks into Spanish.

When the chaos died down everyone started to drift out. “I think it’s time to quit,” Dr. Heirath said. “I’m tired.”

“Me too,” said Nurse G.

“I’m with you,” Nick Strayte said, looking at Helen. “It been a hell of a night.

“Tomorrow, tomorrow the patients are off and I think I will be leaving too,” Helen said, looking at Strayte.

“You can’t tell,” Strayte said.

The patients were singing La Cucaracha led by the linguist.

“I’ve got the runs,”the Doctor whispered to Strayte as they waited for the women to get their wraps.

“Everyone has the runs,” Strayte said, pointing to the line at the bathroom. “It’s the food. Pierre cooked authentic Mexican. He’s a great cook.”

“I think this was more festive than the Crazy Man’s Ball,” Heirath said.

“It is the Crazy Mans Ball,” Strayte said, “it is.”

“They should have invited some sane people,” Heirath muttered softly. “At least one.”

~~

Mash parked his car down by the gate and walked the long curving path to Vermeers. In all of the years he had been the lawyer to the board he had never seen Vermeers this way. It was peaceful.

He decided to see if he could get something to eat at the restaurant. It was different in a way he could not place at first. Then he realized that the person at the reservation desk was Chinese.

“Do you have a reservation?” the man asked in Chinese. Another Chinese person by his side in a tuxedo translated for him.

“I’m Mash, I run the hospital” he said, hoping it would avoid the line. The man looked strangely familiar.

“You do not have reservation?”

“No,” he said to the translator.

“Well,” the little man handling reservations said, “a lot of people say they run China or the hospital or the world. Saying you run China or Vermeers is easy…” Mash did not bother listening. He got on the line of Chinese waiting to get into the restaurant.

“Has the restaurant changed hands?” Mash asked from the end of the line.

“Oh, yes, now is a Chinese restaurant. Very four star Yunnan Hot Pot restaurant,” the translator said in English. “Over the bridge noodles are our specialty.” The reservation’s manager repeated the statement in Chinese.

“What happened to the other restaurant?” Mash asked.

“Its owners went to Argentina on way to El Mexico.”

It made no sense at all. But Vermeers was still a lunatic asylum. He got on the end of the line. After waiting a little while the Chinese in front of him got restless and they all rushed to the door at once jamming the entrance so that no one could move. Mash turned around and left. He was tired more than he was hungry.

He went back to his office. He had not slept in three days because the first time he dozed he dreamed that horrible dream again. In his office Big Wong was waiting for him. “I am big Wong.”

“I remember,” Mash said.

“Have bad news. We are not taking old patients to China.”

“Why,” Mash asked calmly.

“Because old patients have already left.”

“What do you mean the ‘old’ patients have left?”

“They have gone to Argentina. To El Mexico.”

“What the hell are you talking about.”

“Old patients all gone, scaddale.”

It was like something out of a dream. “Are they really gone?

“Yes.”

Something was wrong but he could not put his finger on it. “The old patients are gone,” he repeated.

“Certainly yes,” Big Wong repeated.

“Old patients. ‘Old.’ Patients, just patients. ‘Old’ was what was wrong. “What do you mean ‘old’ patients?” he asked suspiciously.”

“We’re staying,” Big Wong said.

Mash tilted his head as if someone old and ugly had spit something dirty and sour into his ear. He thought he heard them say they were staying.

“We’re staying. Asking for asylum. Return home get shot or worse. Doctor has granted us asylum. Says we are all mad. Hospital has new set of patients, replacing old patients. We are grateful to you and the administrator.”

Why Mash wanted to know. Was selling art such a bad thing? A negligee? Was a negligee really such a bad thing? The Crazy Man’s Ball. We all make mistakes. His father’s mistress? He was paying for every peccadillo his family had ever committed and he resented it.

Triff would have to be told. He would prefer to try to go home and face the dream again if he could sleep but he knew that the anxiety of looking forward to the dream would keep him from sleeping. If he had to face Triff eventually it might as well be now exhausted and on an empty stomach. Maybe the young psychiatrist would frighten him into having a different dream.

He picked up the phone gingerly and dialed Triff. The young psychiatrist’s beeper number was busy, continuously busy. Mash looked up Triff’s number at CTTL and made the call.

“Hello, this is Peter Triff,” a voice said. It sounded like a machine. “Hello. This is Peter Triff, it repeated. “Hello, who is this?”

It was Peter Triff.

“Is that you Triff?”

“Who is this?”

“Mash.”

“Mash who?”

“This is Mash,” he repeated.

“Oh that Mash. It doesn’t matter, mashed or fried.”

“Triff, what is wrong with you. We have trouble.”

“I don’t want any of our trouble I have enough trouble of my own.”

“I have a little ambiguous news,” Mash said. “The old patients are gone.”

“That’s interesting,” Triff said, “to China.”

“No, to Argentina.”

“Oh. Argentina is a nice place.”

“But…,”

“But I prefer Brazil myself,” Triff said.

“Are you all right?”

“No.”

“The bad news is that the Chinese who were supposed to have taken them to China took their place instead. They’ve become patients in the patients place.”

“Oh,” Triff said, “that sounds complicated but interesting. How did you manage that?”

“Have you lost it,” Mash screamed, “I didn’t manage it. It happened.”

“Oh,” Triff said. “Vermeers.” It was as if he realized what Mash was talking about for the first time. “It doesn’t matter. My father’s fluzzy. She took away the money. It wasn’t my father’s fluzzy at all it was my mother.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My mother. She wanted to teach me a lesson. ‘People don’t forget when you hurt them,’” she said. “She is a nasty bitch. My beeper doesn’t work.”

“What trick.”

“You dumb shit,” Triff said coming alive a little. “It was a trick my mother used to bring me down. She got my father’s fluzzy to help. There is no money for a franchised string of lunatic asylums because they’ve pulled it out. They were never going to lend me the money. They only said they would to teach me a lesson.”

Mash hung up the phone. “It was over, finally over. He had lost, really lost big. He wanted to sleep. Really sleep. He was ready to ride the escalator forever.

Chapter 34

Pleasure as well as pain leaves scars

Heirath banged on Strayte’s door. “Come on you two he said,” the patients are getting ready to leave. Helen slipped out of bed kissing Nick Strayte lightly on the back of the head. “I’m leaving too, Nick.”

“I can’t talk you into postponing it for a day or two, can I?” Strayte asked in a dispirited voice.

“No.”

“Then I’ll drive you.”

“No, I’ll ask the patients if they can’t drop me off on their way to the airport. You have enough to do here. I’ll call you later.”

“Why so early. Why not…”

“Nick. I have to go. If I spend part of the day I’ll want to spend all of the day, if I spend part of the week I’ll spend all of the week. If I’ve got to go back and settle things I might as well get it done and get on with my life.”

“I guess you’re right,” Strayte conceded. “I’ve always believed there’s no point of doing something today just because you can’t think of a good excuse to put it off until tomorrow. It’s just the way I do things.” Helen looked at him severely. “It’s a joke,” Strayte said quickly.

Heirath was waiting with Nurse G at the doorway. “It’s a beautiful day,” he said. On the lawn the Chinese were doing Tai Qi as the patients, dressed in the freshest and most original summer outfits of five different decades, made their way from the restaurant across the lawn to the waiting busses. Helen ran to Leonard Mittleman and spoke to him for a minute. Then she returned and said goodbye to the trio who were waiting on the steps.

“I’m sorry you’re leaving,” Nurse G said. “You gave Dr. Dr. there a sense of proportion. Come back and visit us,” she said. “If Vermeers closes,” she wrote a telephone number on a piece of paper. “They’ll know where we are.”

“Thank you,” Helen said. “As soon as I get things straightened away.”

“Nick.” He kissed her. “Things will work out,” she declared positively. “If there’s an El Mexico why shouldn’t there be some sanity in the police force and at the college.”

“Do you think so?” Nick Strayte said. He did not see the logic of it. “Perhaps I’ll come…”

“No,” she said. “If you want to leave you have to go on your own, not with me as any kind of excuse. Anyway, there are things I have to handle, on my own. Later…She kissed him and ran off towards the businessman who was waving wildly. “Call me Nick when…” He could not make out the rest of her sentence. She turned and got on the bus.

“She’ll be fine,” Nurse G said, “they’ll drop her off at the station and she’ll be fine.”

“I know she will,” Strayte said, “it’s not her I’m worried about.”

The busses coiled themselves into a snaking line and headed down the driveway and out the gate. Strayte walked forward and waited until he lost them in the distance. He stayed quietly staring at them for a long time then turned and walked back to where the acting administrator and Nurse G were standing.

As the three of them stood staring into the emptiness of the road a limousine drove up and stopped directly in front of them. A simply but elegantly dressed lady emerged first. A transformed Peter Triff crawled out after her. He stood obediently like a small confused child looking around as if he had no idea where he was.

“Excuse me. Could you help. I’m looking for Dr. John Heirath,” she said.

“I’m Dr. John Heirath. I’m acting chief administrator and acting chief medical officer and acting chief psychiatrist. This is Nurse G and that is Dr. Nick Strayte.”

“I’m Peter Triff’s mother,” the woman said. “Peter has had a nervous breakdown, I’m afraid. I wonder if he might stay at Vermeers for a while.”

Dr. Heirath looked at the woman. “I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s not certain that the hospital will stay in business, you see…”

“I know a lot about the hospital and I’m sure Vermeers is going to stay in business,” she said. “My husband and I will speak to the president of the board. I’m sure something can be worked out. In the mean time could…”

“Of course,” Dr. Heirath said. “Is there anything severely wrong with him beside…”

“Greed? Probably not. He’s lacking common sense,” she said. “Even though he’s a psychiatrist he doesn’t seem to actually know what people are all about. He’s developed an addiction to electronic devices but…but greed, I guess that’s the worst of it. Maybe you can bring him up a little bit again and work it out of him. He’s actually very intelligent but somewhere we went off. I guess my ex-husband and I didn’t realize how badly he could turn out. We see it now.”

“I’m sure we can handle it,” Dr. Heirath said. “He was actually a very good psychiatrist when he wasn’t preoccupied with making a lot of money. He made up a very interesting set of diagnostic categories.”

Big Wong walked over from the lawn. “Well, I am done with my Tai Qi. Is there anything I can do?” Dr.Heirath.

“Yes, actually there is,” the acting administrator said. “This is Dr. Wong, he’s a Chinese psychiatrist,” he said to Triff’s mother. “He’s staying with us for a while. You can take Dr. Triff here to the restaurant for breakfast then find him a room of his own.” Big Wong moved to the side of the boyish looking man. Even for a big nose he looked in very bad shape.

“We will be visiting Peter often, my husband and I and my ex-husband and his floozy,” Peter Triff’s mother said. “Take good care of him.”

“We certainly will,” Dr. Heirath said, speaking for himself and all of the staff present. “He’s a psychiatrist himself. I’m sure he’ll recover quickly.”

Peter Triff looked at Big Wong. “Are we going to China?” he asked quietly.

“No, only to breakfast,” Big Wong said, “only to breakfast.”

~~

Martin Mash relaxed for the first time in years. He did not have to worry about it any more. The idea of a chain of computerized lunatic asylums was finished, over, done. The Japanese had failed, and Tex had failed and Triff had failed and he had failed. He could start to pull his life together.

The hospital would revert to the board and he was still the board’s counsel. He could still run it the way he did before. Perhaps he could get Haddy Washington to resign and convince the board to re-elect his dead father president. It was a little far fetched but it was one possibility. The anti-pornography project had possibilities also. He could talk the board into taking on the pornography project as an additional charitable activity.

They could start some sort of production facility where they could produce educational anti-pornography films showing people how bad really good pornography was. Of course they would need good material to attack, good pornography. It was possible that they could produce that too.

Vermeers would continue and the Crazy Man’s ball would continue and the tax writeoffs would continue. People who were somebody would not be angry at him any more. He could find another artist and keep the art scam going. The world was rich with possibilities.

He went to sleep refreshed and optimistic, but as soon as he closed his eyes he found himself on the escalator again. He woke himself up and managed to keep himself up until 2 am when the strength he needed to fight off sleep was depleted and he dozed off. Even though he found himself about to get the escalator again, he was just too tired to wake up.

But just as he shuffled onto the escalator the crank telephone calls began, calls filled with venom about the Crazy Man’s Ball, calls accusing him of vile things with negligees. When the phone rang he would slip off the escalator and slither out of the dream and answer it and the vituperation would begin and he would listen a while then hang up the phone and slide into the dream again and get back on the escalator again and take the same kind of abuse from people in his dream who were riding up next to him.

After a long phone call in which a disembodied voice accused him of being a greedy, dumb, exploitative low life who lacked a single redeeming quality, a lump with neither taste nor culture, a clod who lacked any understanding and insight, a complete leech on life itself, he shuffled onto the moving steps again and found that his ride was over; he had reached to bottom of the escalator.

There he was arrested by a policeman dressed up as a cowboy and brought to a courthouse where he was arraigned for pretending to be a dead man and misusing the hospital’s funds. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

When he woke up he called Universal Transportation and, speaking in a disguised voice, gave them his address and said that there was a crazy man that needed to be taken to Vermeers. Then he put on one of his wife’s furs and went out and sat on the curb waiting to be taken to the hospital.

When a horse wagon rolled up with a sign saying Universal Transportation, he let the driver help him up and into the back where the straw felt good and he thought he could relax into an escalatorless sleep but the man in the front seat babbled at him continuously and Mash wanted to tell him to shut up but when he opened his mouth what came out was a meaningless sentence that he had seen spray painted on a lightpost. “Sanity is just well mannered craziness,” which just made the man babble even more until they got to Vermeers and the driver of the horse wagon helped him out and he laid down in a cardboard box that was in the hall and waited until someone would find him and take him in.

~~

After Big Wong and Nurse G took Peter triff into Vermeers Dr. Heirath walked over to Strayte. “Do you miss her already? Are you worried?”

“Both, among other things,” Strayte said. “She’s a strong person. But I’m not sure I have the stomach for facing up to what needs to be faced up to.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure out something,” the acting administrator said. “lets go to my office and talk.” Strayte slouched along looking over his shoulder. In the hallway outside of his office, Heirath spotted the cardboard box that Joseff used when he sneaked successfully into the hospital. “I thought I saw Joseff sneaking into the bus with the patients.”

“I did too,” Strayte said. “I’ll throw it away later,” he said. As they walked past the box a head rose up.

“You’re not Joseff,” Dr. Heirath said. Then he recognized the board’s lawyer. “You’re Mash.”

“I think that’s right,” Mash said, “but never mind that fact for a moment. Do you think I could stay for a while? At Vermeers. I’m sea sick, from the escalator,” he explained. “I couldn’t get off and then when…,”

“Don’t think about it,” Heirath said, helping Mash to his feet. Underneath the fur coat he was naked.

“Well,” Strayte said to the acting chief medical officer and acting chief psychiatrist, “business is picking up. I’ll leave you to practice medicine.”

“O.K.,” the acting chief medical officer said, “it looks like things are getting crazy again. I’ll see you later at lunch, we can talk then.”

When the acting administrator got back to his office after helping settle Mash in the ward Louise was there. “Oh. Dr. Heirath I’m sorry I quit. It was my uncle’s fault. I was wondering if I could have my old job back. I thought I had a job in a mall but it didn’t work out. I’ve gotten better at forms, you’ll see.”

“Why not?” Heirath said, “why not?”

He sat down in his chair. His pre-suicide period was coming to an unexpectedly swift end. When he had all the time in the world to think about his future he could not see past the horizon of pre-suicide. Now things were happening rapidly and he could not think focus on it. When he did he got confused.

On the one hand there was Nurse G and all the possibilities of their new relationship. He was certain his dead wife would not object once he explained the situation to her. On the other hand, a bargain was a bargain. He had spent two solid years pre-suiciding and when pre-suicide ended the natural next logical step was something he did not want to think about. If he didn’t come up with some other resolution he would be in the same kind of pickle Strayte was in.

The phone rang. It was Haddy Washington.

“I just got a call from someone. Said she was Peter Triff’s mother. I thought that piece of trash was born of a defective cash machine. She said that the hospital belonged to the board again and that she and her husband wanted to make up for the trouble that Triff caused. Who do you think she was?”

“Peter Triff’s mother,” Dr. Heirath said.

“Yeah, I guessed it were so. Vermeers. You think we could do something with it. I mean it could be made into a real lunatic asylum, a good one. Would you stay. I ain’t all in place myself with these rebellious arms of mine. I wouldn’t stay as president of the board unless you stayed. Other wise…”

“I like that idea, Haddy. We have some patients already. Triff and Mash and some Chinese.”

“I don’t know about no Chinese,” she said. “We’re going to have our hand full with Black folk and Whites and Spanish who I never understood. I was thinking that it would be nice to have a place in town where crazy people could stay that didn’t make them crazier and more lunatic than they were when they came in. We could get rid of the dead men and get some new blood on the board. We’ll fire the old administrator. Send him a telegram. You could run Vermeers, I know you could.”

“It sounds goods Haddy. I’d like to think about it a day or so.”

“Of course, me too. Exciting to think about.”

~~

It was time, Nick Strayte decided. There was no point of putting it off any more. Helen was right. It was time to get on with it. He would go back to the college and go to the hearings. They were going to start in a few days. He was as sane as he was ever going to be. He would defend as much of his behavior was defensible, try to make clear what had happened. He picked up the phone and called Dean Grundle.

“This is Strayte.”

“Oh, finally, Strayte. Will the college have the pleasure of your company at the hearings?”

“When are they?”

“In two days,” Grundle said cheerily. “I’m going to have your ass Strayte. There’s not going to be anything left of you. Any man who would let a young piece of twat with a tatoo cloud his judgment doesn’t belong on the faculty. It’s going to be a pleasure to…”

“Enough,” Strayte said weakly. Some piece of his mind came alive and strained to make sense of something that Grundle said but he couldn’t bring it clearly into focus.

“Not nearly enough, you piece of crud,” Grundle screamed at him. “You’ve been irresponsible from the beginning. Naked at a faculty meeting. Did you think I’d forget. You don’t give a crap about anything except teaching your classes and that abstract shit you’re always thinking about. You’ve got your head up your ass. You think you…”

In his head Strayte watched an image of Mr. Chameleon take on Grundle’s form and parade around. He was holding up a sign that said something that Strayte could not quite make out. Strayte stared at it for a while until he grasped the hint he was being given.

For the first time since he had known Grundle, Strayte yelled back. “You’re behind this,” he shouted. “I’ve been a blind putz. You put Marsha up to it. You promised you would pass her boyfriend if she lodged a complaint about me,” didn’t you.

“That’s preposterous,” Grundle sputtered.

“I should have realized it.” In his head Mr. Chameleon leaped up and down. The message on the sign he was holding had changed. ‘PREREMEMBER,’ it said ‘WHEN YOU WERE FLYING YOU SAW….’ Tatoo. Of course, Strayte thought. “You’ve been screwing her haven’t you.”

Grundle wheezed.

“You’ve been fucking her. I saw you,” Strayte said, “I have a witness. Saturday night a month or so ago in your office. You petty worthless piece of jack shit.” He quieted down and became calm. “I’ve hired a team of cracker jack lawyers. Emily, Emile and Tiny. Ever hear of them? When they get Marsha on the stand they’ll crack her. They’ll break her and she’ll spill her guts. I’ve got you, you piece of crud.”

Grundle was silent for a moment. “Strayte,” he said weakly. “Wait a minute Strayte. Maybe, maybe something could be worked out.”

“What’s to work out.”

“I was thinking. The hearings might not be such a good idea. They would be bad for the college.”

“Now you think of that. Now they would be bad for you, you worthless fart.”

“We could postpone the hearings indefinitely. You could come back, quietly, I mean you have tenure. What you did could be interpreted as an honest, unfortunate mistake.”

“Whose honest unfortunate mistake? No,” Strayte said. “Now I want those hearing. Its your ass now Grundle, you…”

“Be rational Strayte,” Grundle pleaded. Even if what you say is true it wouldn’t help anyone, not you, not me, not Marsha, not the school, not Sociology. Wait a minute. Let me call you back. What’s your number?” Strayte gave him the number.

Grundle called back in three minutes.

“Look Strayte, I think I’ve worked something out, more or less. Not all the details. We can worry about them later. But overall. The College Press would publish your book. I’m on the board of the press. I think I can guarantee they would publish your book. Then you could be considered for promotion right away. I mean since the book is almost published the college personnel and budget committee could count it as a published book. With your grant, I ‘m sure you could be promoted.”

“I’ll think about it,” Strayte said. “I’ll think about it,” and hung up. It was over, finished, done. So quickly. He could go back if he wanted to, not to where he entered the river but a little up stream. It was difficult to think about what he wanted, about the desire that lay behind the wanting. El Mexico. After mooning him the world had changed its mind and kissed him on the cheek and hung out a tit for him to suck. Vermeers. It was still crazy.

He missed Helen. He was in love, he realized. Whether she was in love with him was another matter and whether love was enough to build a relationship on was still another. At best love was a start, a door to a path. He had no idea about where that path would take him. if the door would open. But the loving was exciting, different and it held the promise of something deeper and richer and more complex.

He knew he could not trust Grundle and that going back to the college was no solution for most of the aches he felt. The world outside of Vermeers had not changed one iota. But for the time being most of his immediate troubles were over. He tried to imagine what the hearings would have been like. His testimony that he and Superman had seen Grundle screwing Marsha in his office while they were flying over the college would have probably been inadmissable evidence because it was crazy.

“I would have backed you up. I would have told them what I saw.”

Strayte looked up. Superman was lying on his desk, his head propped up on his arm. He was cheerful and animated. “I would have stuck by you.”

“Like you did when you were teaching me to fly?”

“Well that was different. I was under obligations then. I was bound to conventions, crazy conventions, but conventions nevertheless. It’s not only humans who are bound by conventions. It would have changed everything.”

“And now.”

“Now it would change nothing, nothing at all. Aren’t you disturbed,” he said quickly, not giving Strayte any time to think about what he had just heard, “I mean about seeing me. Do you think you are hallucinating or dreaming or stone, common sense sane just seeing me?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Strayte said. “It doesn’t make much of a difference.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Superman said. “I’m glad you realize that. It took a long time didn’t it Nick. I mean to realize that. It’s so much better to talk without pretending. It all turned out pretty well in the end. For now I mean.”

Strayte was silent.

“Oh don’t be superstitious. It turned out well. Acknowledging that doesn’t mean that tomorrow you not going to fall down again and drown in the shit and muck. But for the time being things have worked out pretty well. I like to think I had a part in it.”

“What part?”

Superman ignored the question. “Do you think you’ve learned anything Nick?”

“Learned what?”

“Anything. Have you learned anything from the chaos and disorder of Vermeers, anything from your own chaos and disorder? Have you been a good student, a good Sociologist? Have you learned anything?”

“I can’t say that I have,” Strayte mumbled, “except maybe that craziness may help you survive in a chaotic world and that there are different kinds of crazy.”

“Like Triff’s categories?”

“No, Triff’s kinds of craziness are the worst kinds of craziness there are. No I was thinking of other kinds of crazy, like defensive craziness.”

“What’s defensive craziness?” Superman wanted to know.

“Oh its what common sense looks like when it adapts to a chaotic, disordered world. We’re in for tough times. Creativity isn’t going to be enough to get by. And courage isn’t going to be enough and thinking straight isn’t going to be enough. Nothing may enough. But a kind of cunning craziness may be least not enough not to get by with.”

“Would you like to try to learn to fly again, Nick. I mean seriously.”

“No.”

“How about skipping. You didn’t do well at that either if I remember.”

Strayte made a face.

“Don’t pout, its true.”

“I don’t think I want to learn how to skip. I knew how to skip once and if I forgot it, it’s probably for a good reason.”

“How about walking. I know a particularly powerful way of walking,” Superman said enthusiastically.

“No,” Strayte said, “I don’t think I’m quite healthy enough for walking. Crawling. I think I better learn to crawl first. Can you teach me a power crawl?”

“I’m not sure I can teach you about crawling, Nick. We never crawled on Krypton. I don’t know how to crawl.”

“Maybe that’s why Krypton blew itself up. Flying is disorienting and people just haven’t been around long enough to have mastered walking or to have learned to skip naturally.

Now crawling keeps your center of gravity where it really belongs. You can go a long way crawling.

And when you get tired you’re close to the ground and it’s easy to collapse and rest. And if you trip and stumble you don’t have far to fall and you’re not likely to hurt yourself really badly. After you’ve crawled though as much disorder and chaos as far as you can get, maybe you can walk a little. Maybe after that, you could skip, then maybe fly. There’s going to be disorder and chaos for a while.”

“It sounds like a long bloody trip,” Superman said dejectedly.

“Yes,” Strayte said. “It probably will be.”

“Well maybe you could show me Nick Strayte. I’m open to learning new things. Could you teach me how to crawl?”

“Okay,” Strayte said,”I’ll teach you.” He got on the floor. He could see the disorder and chaos hurtling like meteors around him. Superman got down on all fours beside him. “It’s dense with chaos and disorder around us, Nick.”

“I know,” Strayte said. “Keep your eyes peeled in front of you. Look as far ahead of you as you can see.”

“O.K.,” Superman said.

“Well then you lift your arm off of the ground,” Nick Strayte said. “Not too high,” he said. “Look around and see if you can see something hurtling toward you.”

“I don’t see anything,” Superman said.

“You probably won’t. The best you can hope for is that nothing is flying at you. I don’t see anything either. If you don’t see anything hurtling toward you think of a reason you should crawl ahead and not stay rooted where you are.”

“I can’t think of…”

“Look,” Strayte explained. “If you can’t think of any reason for crawling forward you’re going to be knocked over by the first piece of crap that comes your way.”

“O.K.,” Superman said. “I thought of a reason for moving ahead. Doing good,” he said.

“O.K., Strayte said, “I did too. You move ahead so you don’t slide backward.”

“It doesn’t sound very uplifting,” Superman complained.

“Its not uplifting,” Strayte said. “It’s just a reason for crawling forward. Now you move your arm forward and feel the ground with your palm. Do you feel it, the ground?” he asked.

“The ground looks fuzzy,” Superman complained. “It doesn’t look

solid.”

“It isn’t,” Strayte said, “that’s the trouble. Don’t pay any attention

to it. Feel as much ground as you can under your palm.”

“Yes,” said Superman.

“Think your thought.”

“I am,” Superman said.

“Now brace yourself. There’s some piece of shit that coming from somewhere that you didn’t see. You ready.”

“I’m ready,” Superman said. There was a giant thud and something hit him just near his liver.

“Those are the worst ones,” Strayte said as Superman tumbled over panting and gasping. “Shit,” Superman yelped.

Strayte ignored the squeal. “After you think of your reason for moving forward and feel the ground under your palm, you set it down and shift your weight. You’ve got to try to feel the ground even if you can’t see it. Then you shift your weight.”

“I think I’m hurt,” Superman complained.

“Don’t be such a wuss,” Strayte said. “Get up and try again. I can’t wait around. I’m going on.”

“Crawling, Nick.”

“Crawling. You can come when you’re ready.”

“I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready for crawling,” Superman said.

“Suit yourself,” Strayte said, “but for the time being I think it may be the only way to inch ahead. I’ll see you there when you get your wind.”

“Where?” Superman asked.

“Wherever,” Nick Strayte answered.

“Good bye, Strayte,” Superman said

“Good bye, Superman,” Strayte said. “Good luck.”