Pharmakon (31 page)

When I asked, “Who’s Dr. Winton?” Lucy said, “She was Mom and Dad’s best friend.”

Fiona insisted Jens was their best friend and Dr. Winton was somebody “Daddy worked with who Mom was jealous of.” They all agreed that the Wintons were rich and that Casper shot her in the throat. There was disagreement over how many bullets were fired, but they all concurred that Mr. Winton was left paralyzed, and Willy said Dad said he had to wear diapers. They talked about people I’d never met or even heard of, a street I never played on, a home, a life I knew only from snapshots. It was hard for me to fill in the blanks, especially when it came to Jack.

Willy said, “Casper killed Jack, too.”

Fiona, a stickler for accuracy, corrected him. “We don’t know that.”

“Why not?”

“No proof except for what Lucy thinks she saw.”

“I don’t think, I know. I saw a man’s shadow in the pricker bushes.”

“That doesn’t mean that it was Casper’s shadow, or that he killed Jack.” Fiona was always accusing Lucy of jumping to conclusions. They knew Jack, I didn’t. It made me sad that they could talk about him without crying, which is what I started to do.

Willy told me, “Don’t be a baby.”

Fiona reminded me, “You said you wanted to know everything.” It was what I couldn’t know that had me crying.

Lucy was crying now, too. “I don’t want to think Casper killed Jack. Maybe Jack just bumped his head on his own and . . .”

“He’s a killer. Killers kill people.” Willy had no doubts.

“I told Mom and Dad he was creepy. Riding up to the house on a girl’s bicycle. He had pimples and he didn’t wash his hair.”

“Yeah, but he got handsome.”

“But why did he shoot the lady doctor?”

“Moron, have you been listening? He’s
crazy
.” Willy began to flick my night-light on and off to scare me.

“He’s a paranoid schizophrenic. That’s why they didn’t send him to the electric chair.” Fiona was using words I didn’t understand.

“Killers deserve to be killed.” Willy was still flicking my nightlight.

“Daddy promised us he’d never get out of the mental hospital. He said there’d be bars and guards and it’d be impossible for him to get out.” At least Lucy was upset.

“How did he escape?” I asked.

“Probably killed a guard or strangled a nurse.” Willy was convinced.

“It’s not Dad’s fault he escaped.” Fiona felt so guilty about Joel she stuck up for my father, even though she would stay angry about the mutual masturbation crack for the rest of her life.

“You’re lucky Casper didn’t drown you. That was probably his plan.” I didn’t believe that.

“Shut up, Willy, you’re scaring him.” I was crying harder now.

Fiona put on her grown-up voice. “Mom and Dad have told you a thousand times not to talk to strangers.” I felt like a stranger as I stared out my window at the darkness.

“What were you thinking, getting into that car with him?”

“I thought he was a friend of Dad’s.”

“Dad hates him.”

“I don’t.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He taught me how to swim.”

Fiona said that when I was older I’d understand. Lucy said if I got scared, I could come into her room. Willy told me, “You’re as crazy as Casper.”

It was hard to sleep after that. Every few hours, the phone would ring. When I got up to pee, I heard my parents talking downstairs. I heard my father say, half pleading, half shouting, “Nora, I have done everything I can.”

My mother answered softly, “No, you haven’t.”

When I got back in bed I heard the metal chains of the swings in the backyard creak in the wind. When I looked out the window, I saw a man sitting on the swing seat, looking up at me in the dark. Sure it was Casper, I opened my window to warn him. “Run away!” was what I was going to shout. But before I could, the shadow lit a cigarette. The glow of the lighter revealed a policeman with a pump shotgun cradled in his lap.

Willy was wrong, at least about Casper’s escape from the Connecticut State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. No one was strangled, no one was shot. At 6:30
A.M.
the Pep Boys woke Casper and the twenty-three other men in Ward B. They slept on thin mattresses in wrought-iron beds with eyehooks at their heads and feet for those occasions when restraints were prescribed. Three rows of eight in a green room the size of a basketball court. As always, the room smelled of urine and spunk. As always, Manny, the most gregarious of the Pep Boys, woke them with his usual greeting, “Rise and shine, girls.”

Casper was in his bed. The bars were still on the windows, and everything was as it had been on the ward since Casper had first woken up there over nine years earlier. After breakfast— oatmeal, powdered skim milk, and a slice of stale toast spread thin with margarine—Casper and his ward mates received their meds. In Casper’s case, 40 mg of reserpine.

Casper had a spotless record of good behavior, a model patient willing to discuss his problems and shortcomings in group therapy. “I use big words and try to impress people with how much I know and that I went to Yale because deep down inside, I know I’m weak and frightened. I want to change, I have to change; I know I’m kidding myself when I say I’m trying my best.” But it was the remarkable progress he showed in his weekly fifty-five-minute therapy sessions with Dr. Shanley that turned the key for Casper.

Week by week, year by year, Casper dazzled and titillated Shanley with a slow, psychic striptease, revealing in installments a life history of sexual shame, repressed homosexuality, Oedipal rage (Shanley was particularly pleased when he got Casper to remember his mother slapping him when he got an erection during one of the cold cream enemas she gave him to cure his chronic constipation), adolescent rage, cruelty to animals that took the form of setting cats on fire. None of which ever happened.

Casper would never have been able to concoct such a seductive case history for himself if he had not had the help of a red-tailed hawk. Casper found its wing feather on the ground just a few feet from where he had helped himself to the locoweed. It was eight inches long and marbled in shades of butterscotch and cream.

A memory from another life, an art history lecture he had attended back in Yale, a professor with a fruity voice describing the wonders of Nero’s vomitorium, how the Romans feasted, gorged, and then inserted a feather down their throats, tickled their glottis, and then vomited so they could gorge again, gave Casper the idea of taking that feather the hawk had dropped from heaven into the toilets just after meds were handed out and dutifully swallowed in front of the nurse. Regurgitating his breakfast and the 40 mg of reserpine before it had a chance to dull the razor’s edge of his thoughts allowed Casper’s feelings for Dr. Friedrich to evolve.

Armed with a feather, no longer having to fight the daily battle against the poison they pumped into him, the thought of revenge distilled into a far more intoxicating and noble idea. That feather gave Casper’s rage wings, enabled it to soar to a lofty place and perch on the righteous thought that by killing Friedrich, he would be preventing Friedrich from contaminating anyone else’s mind with hope.

Now that Casper could think clearly, his mission was sanctified. If he could save just one soul from his own fate, all that he had suffered would have meaning.

Casper was careful to let Shanley feel he was peeling Casper’s onion, rather than the other way around. He was never too forthcoming. He’d clam up for months at a time before treating Shanley to a breakthrough. Casper made himself into a perfect case study, a textbook case worthy of publication.

Seventeen months prior to his escape Casper had in fact caught sight of a letter from a publisher on Shanley’s desk. Casper read it upside down and began to turn the key. He didn’t say anything about the letter. He just planted the idea. “You know, sometimes, after we finish, I remember things I should have told you.”

“What sort of things?”

“Embarrassing stuff, mostly.”

“That’s the stuff we need to talk about in order for me to help you.”

“I know. It might be easier for me to tell you everything, go into detail, if I wrote it down instead of saying it out loud.”

And so it was that Casper earned the privilege of spending two hours each morning in the hospital library with a yellow legal pad just like the ones my father had used and a thick, child’s blunted pencil. Shanley was aware Casper was still a danger to himself and others. He was vigilant in keeping implements of menace far removed from Casper Gedsic’s grasp. Sharp objects were stowed out of reach. Metal spoons that could be ground down into shivs on concrete were counted after each meal. Strings, shoelaces, old rags, torn bedsheets, anything that could be braided into a garrote or a hangman’s noose was kept under lock and key. His psychiatrist wasn’t stupid. It was simply that Dr. Shanley and everyone else at the Connecticut State Hospital for the Criminally Insane had an IQ forty points lower than Casper’s.

The implement of menace Casper constructed was inside his head. That was no man’s land but Casper’s. Shanley was no match for him there. The boy who had drawn up plans for an atom bomb at seventeen grew into a man who turned himself into a different kind of secret weapon. Working slowly, patiently, outside of time, while Casper constructed one persona to distract and disarm Dr. Shanley, he reconfigured himself from within, rewired his heart to wreak havoc on Dr. Friedrich.

At first his motivation had been revenge, old-fashioned, biblical, eye-for-an-eye revenge.
Friedrich has made me miserable, so
shall I make him.
Casper had nothing but contempt for the nineteen-year-old sophomore who had gotten back on the motorcycle and let Dr. Friedrich go on planting his tulips that afternoon back in Hamden. A different Casper, one he did not recognize, had followed that impulse. Yes, Friedrich had lost a son, but Casper had lost himself.

After he’d gotten his medication lowered with the help of jimson weed, this was how Casper had thought about it. At night, when Socrates came calling and penetrated him with his madness, revenge was a pleasant distraction. He could forgive Socrates. He was crazy. He couldn’t help himself. But Friedrich . . .

For the first month or so Casper’s two-hour morning visit to the library was supervised by Shanley himself. The yellow pad, the blunt-tipped pencil, the quiet of the library were all so Casper could put down on paper the history of his madness. Dr. Shanley believed the act of writing would be therapeutic for Casper and a boon to the book he was working on: Shanley’s insights plus first-person remembrances of a genius turned homicidal maniac. It was not long before Shanley was entertaining the possibility that his tome on Casper Gedsic might reach a larger readership than usually afforded scientific publications. Doctor and patient were both trying to write their way out of that grim, nineteenth-century insane asylum.

From day one of this experiment in mutual self-promotion Shanley was in awe of Casper’s ability to commit his life to sentence and word. Casper did not need to compose himself before putting his thoughts down on paper. No outline or daydreaming, no hesitation, no doubt. As soon as Casper sat down, the pencil began to fly across the page. Dr. Shanley was not the first mental hygienist to envy Casper’s brain. By the end of their initial two-hour session of longhand therapy Casper had filled twenty-seven single-spaced pages, all neatly printed and perfectly spelled.

Though the degree to which heredity predetermines an individual’s psychological propensities and emotional predilections from birth onward has yet to be fully studied, and is therefore open to scientific debate, I feel in my case it is worthy of examination.
   My father joined the Nazi party at the age of 16. At the age of 24, a Captain in the SS, he took part in the assassination of Ernst Röhm.

Casper’s father was no such thing. He was in fact a Latvian fisherman. But he had Shanley hooked from page one. Casper wrote over a hundred pages before he got to the imaginary cases of epilepsy, incest, and rape on his mother’s side of the family. Casper’s output was so prolific, so rife with guilt and shame and phobias, whether or not insanity was hereditary, madness was his birthright. Shanley could barely keep up; there weren’t enough hours in the day to study them as carefully as he would have liked. When Casper asked permission to consult the works of Doctors James, Freud, Jung, and, most especially, Emil Kraepelin’s 1899 classic,
Psychiatrie: Ein Lehrbuch für Studierende und
Ärzte,
to acquire psychological language, the technical terminology necessary to make himself clearer to the psychiatrist, Shanley saw no reason not to oblige—less work for him. It was in those volumes that Casper hid the pages of his real history, the one that started the day he made the mistake of bicycling out to take pictures of Friedrich and his parrots.