Color Blind (29 page)

H
e struts around the darkened studio like a victorious soldier. He has never felt so powerful. Is it because he drank the artist’s blood from his cupped hands that he feels the artist has become a part of him? He’s never done that before, but this time, well, it just felt right, special. He didn’t need or want gloves, nothing to separate him from the act. He is no longer afraid of being caught. He is stronger and smarter than any of them.

But then a memory, a feeling, an unexplained sensation of suffocation overcomes him, and the grunts and groans have started at the back of his mind, accompanied by music and jingles.

He shudders.

Those doctors always wanted him to talk about it.

Tell us what happened. Was there some sort of accident?

But he wouldn’t tell them. It was his secret. His to harbor; a deep, festering sore to cultivate, to feed.

One time he weakened, told that woman doctor some of the stuff that had happened to him—
just for the fun of it!
Just for the taste of it!
—and he saw tears in her eyes and wanted to cry along with her, but he did not, would not, could not, and then told her he’d made it all up, to make a fool of her. They thought he was stupid. But he showed them, didn’t he, left them a little something to remember him by. A picture flickers in the back of his mind: a name tag on a white uniform, which turns a brilliant and beautiful red, and a name, Belinda.

Another memory…The taste of rubber in his mouth. Counting backward. Goop on his temples. Head splitting. Jaw aching. Arms and legs weak and sore. And then the pictures, the noise, even his friends—Tony and Dylan and Brenda and Donna—would disappear. Where would they go? He was so lonely waiting for them to return, which they did, finally, bringing all the racket along with them, but it was worth it to have his friends back.

He doesn’t want to think about that now, presses his fingertips into his temples until the pain brings him back to the moment, and the memories dissipate. He would prefer to remember his most recent work. Phantom color, like an amputated limb, flashes in his brain, and he believes it is all happening in front of his eyes rather than behind them.

How amazing it was, two of them, back to back.
Double your pleasure…
Perfect timing. The girl arriving at precisely the right moment—just as everything was starting to fade—so that he could keep it going longer than ever before, and the colors—
oh, the colors
—how they shimmered and glowed, the chromatic intensity like nothing he’d ever seen.

She witnessed his power, how well he had identified everything, and agreed with everything he had written onto the artist’s canvases. For a moment, he had considered taking the girl home with him to keep around his studio and help him the way she had helped the artist, who was no longer going to need her help, but he was afraid that Donna and Brenda wouldn’t like it, and the girl did seem a little jumpy and nervous and screamed and cried, and who needed that?

“Not me,” he says, then shuts his aching eyes and pictures the art
her-story-n
viewing his work lined up on the wall in the artist’s studio and how impressed she will be. It’s all for her now. She’s the one.
You can’t beat the real thing!
She is his savior. Has always been there for him. Maybe she will even tell Jasper Johns, which would be so grrrrrrrrrrreat, and then the three of them could get together and talk about art and maybe have a drink the way people do in the movies. It all makes sense: The artist’s studio being on Mulberry Street, which was clearly an omen, because mulberry was his second-favorite color in the box of sixty-four colors.

He glances at his hands, notes a slight blush of flesh tone and knows why: The artist’s scarlet crimson raspberry magenta mulberry cerise razzmatazz blood runs through his veins.

He turns on the TV and flips channels until he finds something comforting and familiar,
The Flintstones,
is keenly aware of Fred and Wilma against a multicolored prehistoric landscape, and wanting to believe so badly tries another channel, and yes, Xena’s hair is a lustrous blue-black, but then it fades and he remembers those first days after the accident when he wanted to die.

But not now.

Killing the artist made him feel alive, and close to her, to Kate, the art
her-story-n
—and now he wants to feel even closer.

T
he minute Kate saw Willie, she was crying, a combination of happiness and all the sorrow she’d been trying to tamp down for the past two weeks since Richard had died brought to the surface. Willie, whom she had known and loved since she and Richard had adopted his sixth-grade class through Let There Be a Future; Willie, the smart and talented little boy who had grown up to become the successful artist; Willie, who was almost like a son to her.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry. Really I am. It’s just that I’m so glad to see you.” Kate hugged him and he hugged her back, and he cried too, and they clung to each other for what seemed like a long time, until Kate broke the hold and pulled back. “You look great,” she said, sniffling. “More mature, I think.”

“But no taller,” said Willie, as Kate laid her arm on top of his shoulder and led him down the hall.

“Hey, kiddo, don’t think life up here at six feet is a picnic. I am sure I’ve recounted, in detail, the horrors of being a five-foot-eleven girl in the ninth grade. Not pretty.” She swiped tears off her cheeks and plopped a filter into the coffeemaker. “Trust me, you’re perfect just as you are.”

Willie smiled one of his dazzling smiles, and Kate felt her heart opening up again.

“It’s good to be back. Too many of those tall Aryan types in Germany. Of course they’re all
so
nice to me,” said Willie. “It’s sort of getting on my nerves.”

“A week in New York will take care of that. I wish you were staying longer.”

“I would, but I’ve got like a dozen talks to give in Berlin and Frankfurt. They really make you work for these fellowships. Very annoying.”

Kate regarded Willie, the grown man, successful artist, and thought back to the little boy she’d first met and she could not stop her eyes from clouding.

“You okay?” He laid his hand on her arm.

“I will be. So, your show,” she said, shifting gears quickly. “I can’t wait to see your new paintings.”

“I’m terrified. Petrycoff. What a trip that guy is.”

“It’s the best gallery in New York.”

“A lot to live up to.”

“I’m not worried.”

“That makes one of us.” Willie smiled, then frowned. “I can’t get over what happened. Boyd Werther, I mean.”

Crime scene photos flipped through Kate’s mind like a deck of cards. “It’s horrible,” she said. “I still can’t believe it.” Lately, there were so many things she had trouble believing.

“How’s Petrycoff dealing with it?”

“Too busy thinking about doubling the price of a Werther canvas to think about it.” Kate frowned. “I shouldn’t say that. Everybody grieves in their own way.” Grieving. Something she might have to consider herself.

“Only if you’re human. And Petrycoff, well…”

Kate managed a laugh. “When can I see your new paintings?”

“We’re installing tomorrow. Come by the gallery. Get a preview.”

“I’m there.”

“So where’s Nola? She e-mailed me that she’s a whale.”

“At a doctor’s appointment. She’ll be back. She’s dying to see you.”

“I can’t wait to see her too. Can’t believe she’s having a kid.”

“I’ve gotten used to it,” said Kate.

After they had coffee Willie had to get going, a meeting with the
Art in America
writer who was doing a story about his new work, and Kate did not cry again until she closed the apartment door behind him.

When the phone rang she let the answering machine pick it up until she heard it was Dr. Brillstein.

“It came to me,” he said. “What I’d been trying to remember. A case study. A color-blind boy, a teen, who’d been institutionalized for a spell, back in the mid-nineties. One of the therapists, a Dr. Margo Schiller, who worked with him, wrote a paper about the experience for a psychiatric journal. I can fax it to you, if you’d like. I think you will find it quite fascinating.”

Moments later, Kate was collecting the pages from her fax machine. She settled onto the couch, riveted from the very first line:
Tony T, a patient at the Pilgrim State Psychiatric Center, is completely color blind.

Kate skipped over the more technical psychiatric lingo and concentrated on the therapist’s notes from the time of treatment, scattered throughout the text.

Subject suffers from extreme delusional paranoia, possibly dual or more personalities. Speaks to, and takes advice from, imaginary friends…

It appears that patient Tony T has moved from killing insects to rodents. Believes that the act of killing restores his normal vision.

A chill shuddered through Kate’s body. Could he be the one? There was nothing about whether or not this patient was cured—or even alive.

D
r. Margo Schiller was not at all what Kate expected, a pretty woman in her late forties, maybe early fifties, sparkling eyes lined with kohl and hair to match, a light, sweet voice that bordered on the babyish. She showed Kate into a room with one huge window that offered an airy vista from lower Fifth Avenue up to the Empire State Building.

“Tony T,” said Kate, after they’d gone through a few preliminaries. “I realize this is confidential information, but I’m wondering if you could divulge what the T stood for?”

“The police tried to discover his name, later, after he’d gone missing. He never supplied one other than Tony the Tiger, and obviously that wasn’t his name.”

Tony the Tiger. Tony.
One of the names in the psycho’s scribbled borders.

“He used to say he
borrowed
it,” Dr. Schiller continued. “He told me once that he didn’t remember his real name, but it was always hard to tell whether he was lying or telling the truth. I’m not sure he even knew. He often broke off in mid-sentence. I am quite certain he heard voices, had aural hallucinations.”

“Like David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam?”

“Perhaps. It’s always difficult to know. As a therapist one attempts to glean the truth from a patient, but he was an extremely difficult one to reach.”

“What about his childhood?”

Dr. Schiller offered a paradoxical smile. “He claimed he was an orphan, that he’d been abandoned as a baby and grew up on the street. But on one occasion he broke down and recounted a most horrendous childhood, acts of appalling abuse, absolutely chilling. The next day he said he’d made it all up, that one of his
friends
had told him to do it.” She hooked quotation marks around the word
friends
with her fingers. “I could never tell if he was playing me. But I believed the story of his abusive childhood had been a true one, and that when he remembered it he had to immediately deny it had ever happened to him—the memories were simply too painful.”

Kate nodded. She’d known way too many child-abuse cases, both as a cop and working for Let There Be a Future. “How old was he when you worked with him?”

“I’m not sure. We had no family history. I would guess he was twelve or thirteen, possibly a bit older. It’s difficult to say. He changed his birthday and age every few weeks. In some ways he was like a little child. But in other ways…very mature.” Dr. Schiller stared out the window as though she were looking into the past. “He had the most startling blue eyes, but they were…dead.” She turned back to Kate. “I saw him twice a week for almost a year, but as I said, it was difficult to know him. He was very clever, I can tell you that, though uneducated. Charming one minute, withdrawn and moody the next. And quite…beautiful. An asset of which he was keenly aware.” She raised a dark-penciled eyebrow. “He often flirted with me in a way that was extremely inappropriate. Many abused children become overly sexualized. That is, they learn to use their allure, to use sex to get what they want.” The doctor sighed. “I think on some level he just wanted approval, some kind, any kind of love—though I doubt he could accept genuine love or affection. He had an extremely damaged, though needy, ego. A true sociopath, I believed at the time.” She took a few small breaths. “There was something both frightening and tragic about him. He never mixed, a complete loner, and when he did not know he was being observed you could see his lips moving, and sometimes hear him speaking in different voices.”

“The imaginary friends.”

“I think so, though he would never talk about them when asked.”

Kate was taking copious notes. “And he was color blind.”

“Totally. He was sent to us by physicians who treated him after he’d been in some kind of accident, a head injury.”

“You wouldn’t remember any of the doctors’ names, would you?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. One, that is, Dr. Warren Weinberg. He’s a friend of mine, which is why Tony T was referred to me. Warren treated him at Roosevelt Hospital.”

“And he thought Tony T should be in a mental hospital?” The words
mental hospital,
brought up memories that Kate did not want to think about.

“Warren, Dr. Weinberg, found him to have extreme mood swings from depression to extreme hostility, and he would not disclose what had happened to him. Nor did he ever tell me, or any of the other therapists at the center. The accident that caused his color blindness remained a mystery.” She shook her head. “Warren thought we might be able to get him to deal with the fact of his color blindness, of which he was in complete denial, though he was clearly afflicted in the way any cerebral achromatope would be—limited vision, extreme sensitivity to sunlight. He wore sunglasses all the time, though he pretended they were simply a part of his costume, a way to look cool. He was always trying to prove that he wasn’t color blind, saying things like, oh, what a beautiful pink blouse you’re wearing, but he’d often be wrong. If you corrected him he’d become incensed, furious. Once, with an orderly who had taunted him about his condition, he had to be restrained because he lashed out so violently.”