If This Be Madness By: Lawrence Block
This will be my very first blog entry. Although it is not by me, I want people out there to know where I am coming from. I do not proclaim to be sane or to be insane, just that the world I see isn't black or white. There are grey areas everywhere and I know no boundaries. ^^
St.Anthony's wasn't a bad place at all. There were bars on the windows, of course, and one couldn't come and go as one pleased, but it might have been a lot worse. I had always thought of insane asylums as something rather grim. The fictional treatment of such institutions leaves a good deal to be desired. Sadistic orderlies, medieval outlook, all of that. It wasn't like that, though.I had a room to myself, with a window facing out on the main grounds.
There were a great many elms on the property, plus some lovely shrubs which I would watch the ground keeper go back and forth across the wide lawn behind a big power mower. But of course I didn't spend all of my time in the room--or cell, if you prefer it. There was a certain amount amount of social intercourse--gab sessions with other patients, interminable ping pong matches, all of that. And the occupational therapy which was a major concern at St. Anthony's.
I made these foolish little ceramic tile plates, and I wove baskets, and I made potholders. I suppose this was of some value. The simple idea of concentrating very intently on something which is essentially trivial must have some therapeutic value in cases of this nature--perhaps the same that hobbies have for a sane man.Perhaps you're wondering why I was in St. Anthony's. A simple explanation.
One cloudless day in September I left my office a few minutes after noon and went to my bank, where I cashed a check for two thousand dollars. I asked for--and received--two hundred crisp new ten-dollar bills. Then I walked aimlessly for two blocks until I came to a moderately busy street corner. Euclid and Paine, as I remember, but it's really immaterial.There I sold the bills. I stopped passers-by and offered them at fifty cents a piece, or traded them for cigarettes, or gave them away in return for a kind word. I recall paying one man fifteen dollars for his necktie, and it was a spotted one at that. Not surprisingly, a great many persons refused to have anything to do with me. I suspect they thought the bills were counterfeit.In less than a half hour I was arrested.
The police, too, thought the bills were fake. They were not. When the police led me off to the patrol car I laughed uproariously and hurled the ten-dollar bills into the air. The sight of the officers of the law chasing after these fresh new bills was quite comic, and I laughed long and loud.In jail, I stared around blindly and refused to speak to people. Mary appeared in short order with a doctor and a lawyer in tow. She cried a great deal into a lovely linen handkerchief, but I could tell easily how much she was enjoying her new role. It was a marvelous experiment in martyrdom for her--loving wife of a man who just managed to flip his lid. She played it to the hilt. When I saw her, I emerged at once from my lethargy. I banged hysterically on the bars of the cell and called her the foulest names imaginable. She burst into tears and they led her away. Someone gave me a shot of something--a tranquillizer, I suspect. Then I slept.I did not go to St. Anthony's right away. I remained in jail for three days--under observation, as it were--and then I began to return to my senses.
Reality returned. I was quite baffled about the entire experience. I asked the guards where I was, and why. My memory was very hazy. I could recall bits and pieces of what had happened but it made no sense to me.There were several conferences with the prison psychiatrist. I told him how I had been working very hard, how I had been under quite a strain. This made considerable sense to him. My "sale" of the ten dollar bills was an obvious reaction of the strain of work, a symbolic rejection of the fruits of my labors. I was fighting against overwork by ridding myself of profits of that work. We talked it out, and he elaborate notes, and that was that. Since I had done nothing specifically illegal, there were no charges to worry about. I was released.
Two months thereafter, I picked up my typewriter and hurled it through my office window. It plummeted to the street below, narrowly missing the bald head of a Salvation Army trumpet player. I heaved an ashtray after the typewriter, tossed my pen out the window and was about to leap out after my typewriter when three employees took hold of me and restrained me, at which point I went joyously berserk.I struck my secretary--a fine woman, loyal and efficient to the core--in the teeth, chipping one incisor rather badly. I kicked the office boy in the shin and belted my partner in the belly. I was wild, and quite difficult to subdue.Shortly thereafter, I was in a room at St. Anthony's.
As I have said, it was not an unpleasant place at all. At times I quite enjoyed it. There was the utter freedom from my responsibility, and a person who has not spent time in a sanitarium of one sort or another could possibly appreciate the enormity of this freedom. It was not merely that there was nothing that I had to do. It goes considerably deeper than that.Perhaps I can explain. I could be whomever I wished to be. There was no necessity for common courtesy or civility. If one wished to tell a nurse to go to the devil, one went ahead and did so. One needed to make no discernible effort to appear sane. If I had been sane, after all, I would not have been there in the first place.
Every Wednesday, Mary visited me. This in itself was enough reason to fall in love with St. Anthony's. Not because she visited me once a week, but because for six days out of ever seven I was spared her company. I have spent forty-four years on this planet, and for twenty-one of them I have been married to Mary, and her companionship has grown increasingly less tolerable over the years. Once, several years ago, I looked into the possibly of divorcing her. The cost would have been exorbitant. According to the lawyer I consulted, she would have wound up with my house and car and the bulk of my worldly goods, plus my monthly alimony sufficient to keep me permanently destitute. So we were never divorced.
As I said, she visited me every Wednesday. I was quite peaceable at those times; indeed, I was peaceable through out my stay at St. Anthony's, aside from some minor displays of temper. But my hostility toward her showed through, I'm afraid. Periodically I displayed some paranoid tendencies, accusing her of having me committed for one nefarious motive or another, calling her to task for imagined affairs with my friends (as if any of them would want to bed down with the sloppy bitch) and otherwise being happily nasty to her. But she kept returning, every Wednesday, like the worst of all possible pennies.
The sessions with my psychiatrist (not mine specifically, but the resident psychiatrist who had charge of my case) were not at all bad. He was a very bright man and quite interested in his work, and I enjoyed talking to him. For the most part I was quite rational in our discussions. He avoided deep analysis--there was no time for it, really, as he had tremendous work load as it was--and concentrated instead in trying to determine just what was causing my nervous breakdowns and just how they could be controlled. We worked things out rather well. I made discernible progress, with just a few minor lapses from time to time. We investigated the causes of my hostility toward Mary. We talked at length.I remember very clearly the day they released me from St. Anthony's. I was not pronounced cured--that's a rather difficult word to apply in cases of this particular nature. They said that I was readjusted, or something of the nature, and that I was in condition to rejoin society. Their terminology was a bit more involved than all that. I don't recall the precise words or phrases, but that's the gist of it.That day, the air was cold and the sky was filled with clouds. There was a pleasant breeze blowing.
Mary came to pick me up. She was noticeably nervous, perhaps afraid of me, but I was quite docile and perfectly friendly toward her. I took her arm. We walked out of the door to the car. I got behind the wheel--that gave her a pause, as I think she would have preferred if she drove. I drove, however, out through the gate and headed toward our home.
"Oh darling," she said. "You're all better now, aren't you?"
"I'm fine," I said. I was released five months ago. At first it was far more difficult on the outside than it had been within St. Anthony's heavy stone walls. People did not know how to speak with me. They seemed afraid I might go berserk at any moment. They wanted to talk normally with me, yet they did not know how to refer to my "trouble." It was all quite humorous. People warmed up to me, yet at the same time they never entirely relaxed with me. While I was normal in most respects, certain mannerisms of mine were unnerving, to say the least. At times, for instance, I was observed mumbling incoherently to myself. At other times i answered questions before they were asked of me, or ignored the question entirely. Once, at a party, I walked over to the hi-fi, removed a record from the turntable, sailed it out of an open window, and put another record on.
These periodic practices of mine were bizarre, and they sent people on edge, yet they caused no real harm.The general attitude seemed to be his--I was a little touched, but I was not dangerous, and I seemed to be getting better with the passage of time. Most important, I was able to function in the world at large. I was able to earn a living. I was able to live in peace and harmony with my wife and friends. I might be quite mad, but it hurt no one.Saturday night, Mary and I are invited to a party. We will go to a home of some dear friends whom we have known for at least fifteen years. There will be eight or ten other couples there, all of them friends of a similar vintage.It's time, now. This will be it.You must realize that it was very difficult at first. The affair with the ten-dollar bills, for example--I'm essentially frugal, and such behavior went very much against the grain. The time when I hurled the typewriter out the window was even harder. I did not want to hurt my secretary, of whom I have always been very fond, nor did I want to strike all those other people. But I did very well, I think. Very well indeed.
Saturday night, at the party, I will be quite uncommunicative. I will sit in a chair by the fireplace and nurse a single drink for an hour or two, and when people talk to me I will stare myopically at them and will not answer them. I will make little involuntary facial movements, nervous twitches of one sort of the other.Then I will rise abruptly and hurl my glass into the mirror over the fireplace, hard enough to make either the glass or the mirror shatter or maybe both. Someone will come over to subdue me. Whoever it is, I will strike him or her with all my might. Then, cursing violently, I will hurry to the side of the hearth and will pick up the heavy cast-iron poker.I will smash Mary's head with it.The happy thing is that there will be no nonsense trial. Temporary insanity may be difficult to plead in some cases, but it should hardly be a problem when the murderer has a past record of psychic instability. I have been in the hospital for a nervous breakdown. I have spent a considerable amount of time in a mental institution. The course is quite obvious--I shall be arrested and shall be sent forthwith to St. Anthony's.
I suspect they'll keep me there for a year or so. This time, of course, I can let them cure me completely. Why not? I don't intend to kill anyone else, so there's nothing to set up. All I have to do is make gradual progress until such time as they pronounce me fit to return to the world at large. But when that happens, Mary will not be there to meet me at the gate. Mary will be quite dead."Already I can feel the excitement building within me. The tension of the thrill of it all. I can feel myself shifting over into the role of the madman, preparing for the supreme moment. Then the glass crashing into the mirror, and my body moving in perfect synchronization , and the poke in my hand, and Mary's skull crushed like an eggshell.You may think I'm quite mad.
That's the beauty of it--that's what everyone thinks, you see.
