Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (10 page)

Half an hour later I turned off at the third Salem exit and stopped at the traffic light. Across the street, an old man with weathered skin squinted straight ahead as he shuffled toward the entrance of a pancake house. A step behind him, a plump woman with short, iron gray hair gestured with her hand, talking rapidly.

He held the door open for her, a blank expression on his face, nodding as she passed in front of him.

I drove through a section of small wood frame houses built in the 1950s and 1960s, single-story houses bunched close together, with green grass lawns in front and square fenced yards in back.

When they were new, children could ride their bicycles in the street and no one thought about locking their doors at night.

Now there was too much traffic and everyone locked everything they owned. Finally, I reached Center Street and found what I was looking for.

You did not need to know the date it was built; you knew as soon as you saw it that this was something out of the nineteenth century. There must have been a certain pride of construction when it was finished, a belief that something spectacular had been achieved. It is hard to imagine what old buildings looked like when they were new. Even when a fortune has been spent on their restoration, it is like seeing a very old woman dressed in expensive clothes: She may look elegant, but she will never look young. The photographs that were taken of it at the time are old themselves, grainy black and white shots of stone and marble and brick, an enormous public building rising up in the middle of a place where, as yet, scarcely anyone lived. And always and everywhere, the people whose pictures were taken, staring into the camera, somber, sullen, as if each of them carried in their souls the secret of their own damnation. You could see the same thing in courtrooms all over the state, old enlarged photographs showing the early settlers, with grim faces and dead eyes, standing near the covered wagons that had brought them across the prairies and over the mountains. The women look meaner than the men, and the men look demented; the children look as old as their parents, and their parents look like they have already died.

My imagination was too much at work. Everything here reminded me of death, or things worse than death. Lining the street, large leafless elms, grotesque black shadows set against a hard leaden sky, looked as if they had been torn out of the earth and set upside down so their roots would wither and die in the harsh arctic air. But more than anything else, it was the building itself that gave me this awful sense of emptiness and despair, this sense that nothing had any meaning. It ran along the edge of the street, not more than twenty feet away, for the equivalent of two city blocks, a three-story brick fortress with a metal roof joined together with pinched, overlapping seams, like the old buildings of Paris. The yellow paint had in places faded white and in others peeled away, leaving behind bare bricks bruised with splotches of brownish purple covered with moss and mold. Supported by heavy three-sided braces, rotting wooden eaves extended the roof out over the walls. In vertical rows, narrow windows, some of them six feet tall and not more than a foot and a half wide, let in the outside light through a dozen small wood-framed glass panes.

At the far end, below a grass-covered knoll, I turned into the long circular drive. There were two street signs at the entrance, one for each of the narrow paved roads that bridged off from one another. Bluebird Lane and Blue Jay Lane. At the top, a third road led down the other side, through a cluster of tall firs, past two tennis courts laid out end to end and separated by a rusting chain link fence. The nets were frayed and one of them sagged to within a foot of the playing surface. Large puddles of water had collected in the hollows of the cracked cement. The road, little more than a pathway, disappeared into another clump of trees and came out a little farther on at a row of clapboard houses with dormer windows. The road was called Bobolink Way. I wondered who had given each of these small streets the name of a bird and what must have been going through their minds.

I parked at the top of the knoll in front of the entrance to the three-story brick building I had just come around. Unlike the rest of it, this part, which was four stories instead of three, had been newly painted, a vibrant yellow trimmed in harvest brown. At the top was a cupola with four false windows. Whether they had been painted over or whether there had always been wooden panels there instead of glass, I could not tell. The roof above the cupola was shaped into a narrow spike, and on top of that was a flagpole with a round orb on top. Freshly painted, the roof was already leaching rust.

Closing the car door, I took one last look up. A pigeon sat on top of the flagpole. Then, eager to get out of the weather, it flew off. For a moment I thought about getting back in the car and driving back home.

I stood in front of the steps, which were covered by an ornate iron canopy, and read the sign posted discreetly next to the entrance. Cascade Hall. It had a nice, northwestern ring about it.

I turned around and headed across the parking lot to the building on the other side, built, by the look of it, in the middle of the twentieth century when the only criterion for a public building was how much it was going to cost. This one, a brick rect-angle with square glass windows and linoleum floors, must have come in under budget. I checked to make sure I was in the right place. Siskiyou Hall. It was the administration building where I had my appointment.

As I started up the steps, I stumbled, a sharp pain in my leg.

I caught my balance and the pain vanished as quickly as it had come. It had been years since that leg had bothered me. It seemed a strange coincidence that it should happen now. I paused in front of the door and read the neatly painted letters. Even after all this time, it was still hard to believe that Elliott Winston was a patient in the Oregon State Hospital for the criminally insane.

Six

_______

Dr. Friedman was going to be a few minutes late. I sat down on a cushioned chair and thumbed through a computer magazine, glanced at the beginning of an article claiming that the printed page was about to become an anachronism, and tossed it aside, wondering if the editor had caught the irony. I heard a voice. “Mr. Antonelli?”

I turned around and found myself under the firm, clear-eyed gaze of a man in his early forties with thick brown hair and a round, perfectly symmetrical face. He was wearing a tweed sports jacket and had a clipboard tucked under his arm. After we shook hands, Dr. Friedman led me back to his office and gestured vaguely toward the two armless chairs in front of his government-issue metal desk. There were two steel bookcases, one on the wall next to where I sat and a smaller one that covered the wall below the window behind the desk.

“Dr. Friedman, I—”

He had begun to concentrate on the page on top of the clipboard. He looked up and, with a brisk smile, raised his hand. “I’ll be with you in just a minute,” he said as he went back to what he was reading.

I tried not to be angry and made a conscious effort to relax.

He flipped over one page and began reading the next. A moment later he went to the next one, and then, apparently satisfied with what he had seen, nodded twice and shoved the clipboard to the side. Leaning back in the swivel chair, he crossed his ankle over his knee and with his hands began to rotate a pencil he held in his lap.

“How can I help you, Mr. Antonelli? You’re here to see one of our patients, correct?”

“Elliott Winston.”

“Elliott. Yes, I know.” The pencil was going back and forth a quarter turn each way. His eyes, now that they were on me, never left.

“Is there a problem?” I asked, wondering why I had to see him before I could see Elliott.

“Why don’t you tell me?”

Friedman’s voice was a warm monotone, and it was starting to make me feel uneasy. And it was not just his voice. He was a trained observer, always looking for symptoms of abnormality, and whether he was aware of it or not, he was studying me with the same clinical detachment with which I imagined he regularly diagnosed the various forms of psychosis.

“I’m not sure it’s really a problem,” I remarked. I looked out the window over his shoulder. “But when I was very young I used to have two dreams every night. In one of them I killed my father; in the other I slept with my mother.” My eyes came back to him.

“But that’s just a normal part of growing up, isn’t it?”

For half a second he believed me, and even when he knew I was kidding, he was not quite prepared to laugh. It was my turn to study him.

“There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask.”

“Yes?” he replied carefully.

“You know that old line about if you speak to God, you’re okay, but if God speaks to you, you’re not?”

He hesitated, not sure where I might be going with this. “Yes,”

he said, dragging out the word.

“What about the person who decides he must be God, because every time he prays he finds he’s talking to himself?”

His eyebrows shot straight up. “That’s quite good. I’ll have to remember that one. But, after all, it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? Whether God talks to him or he thinks he’s God and he’s talking to himself. In both cases he’s clearly delusional.”

“Insane?”

He shrugged. “Yes, of course.”

“That leaves us with an interesting problem, doesn’t it? Either Moses lied when he claimed God gave him the tablets with the Ten Commandments written on them, or he was delusional—insane according to your diagnosis. The result of course is that the entire moral and legal framework of the western world either rests on a falsehood or is part of an insane delusion. Which do you think it is?”

“I shouldn’t like to think it was either, Mr. Antonelli,” he said in that practiced, well-modulated voice of his. “We’re talking about the kind of mental disease that affects normal people, ordinary human beings. We’re talking about the kind of thing that happened to Elliott Winston,” he added, trying to steer the conversation back to safer ground.

“Does Elliott talk to God?” I asked, curious.

Pursing his lips, Friedman narrowed his eyes and peered into the distance. Once again, he began to spin the pencil back and forth between his fingers.

“You mean, does God talk to him,” he said. His eyes came back around. “The answer is, I’m not quite sure I know. Sometimes he hears voices, all right, but whose voices … ?” The question hung in the silence, unanswered and, from the doubtful expression on his face, I assumed unanswerable.

A look of hopeful encouragement entered his eyes. “As long as he stays on his medication everything seems to be all right.”

He reached forward and grabbed a file from a metal holder on the front corner of the desk. Hunched over the open folder, he drew his index finger from the top to the bottom of the page and then, shaking his head, turned to the next one.

“When he first came here, they had him on some pretty dreadful stuff. Thorazine, mainly.” He closed the file. “Well, it was twelve years ago, and that’s what was available,” he tried to explain. “You have to remember, he was considered quite violent.

Not to put too fine a point on it, they kept him pretty well doped up. Have you ever seen anyone on heavy dosages of that stuff?”

he asked, a distasteful expression on his face. “They’re like zom-bies. They can barely function. I wouldn’t have done it, even if he were violent—and, by the way, I have my doubts about that.

I don’t have any doubt he was mentally ill—he still is—but since he’s been my patient—a little over three years now—I’ve not seen any evidence of a disposition toward violent behavior.

“He was initially diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. That was the diagnosis made before he got here, when it was decided that he was suffering from a mental disease and was committed to the state hospital instead of being dealt with in the normal fashion by the criminal justice system. ‘Guilty, but insane.’ That is the operative phrase,” he started to explain. “Oh, I’m sorry,”

he quickly apologized. “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you? You probably know all about this sort of thing, don’t you?”

I remembered the man who sat next to me for a while that first night I was serving my sentence for contempt, the one who thought I was working undercover to help him because the voice in his head told him that was why I was there.

“I know a little about it,” I replied. I did not tell him what had happened to me in jail; I told him instead about what I had seen in court.

The rain had started to fall, a steady downpour of gray depression, streaking the window and twisting the view of the things seen through it into strange, monstrous shapes.

“I did commitment cases for a while. The standard was whether they were a danger to others or a danger to themselves. We would gather around a table, sometimes in a conference room, sometimes around the counsel table in the courtroom. Whoever was making the claim that there should be a commitment would give their reasons. And then, because the statute required two doctors, and because you could never find two physicians willing to spend an hour of their time for the small amount that was paid, there would usually be a young general practitioner and a psychologist.”

Friedman had retreated somewhere behind his eyes. He was listening to me the way someone listens to a radio or a television set in the background while they read the newspaper or carry on a conversation with someone else.

“What I learned right away,” I went on, gazing right at him,

“is that the doctors never asked the right questions.”

You could almost hear the slick, sliding sound of a single thin transparent film dropping away from the lenses of his eyes.

“So I decided I’d do it. My client said he heard three voices in his head all the time. That was all the doctors needed to hear.

The judge asked me if I had any questions. ‘These voices you hear. Do you know who they are?’ He looked at me, his face all lit up. ‘Yes,’ he said eagerly, grateful that someone had finally asked. ‘Linda Ronstadt, Roy Orbison, and Conway Twitty.’ “