PROLOGUE

 

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

 

– William Shakespeare, The Tempest

 

Sunlight crystalized the sweet blades of grass, making them translucent, backlit, small glowing shafts of photosynthetic art. Even on the neglected lawn of a long-abandoned asylum the sunlight orchestrated its natural magic.

Quite a sight, this field of glowing emerald surrounding what was originally a construct of graceful lines and masterful stonework, but which now crumbled by degrees. Once it was a mansion, the home of a brilliant doctor who believed he could fathom whatever it was that twisted the minds of some into a wrecked and contorted trellis of incomprehensible complexity. In his zeal, he turned the gigantic structure into a hospital dedicated to the service of the insane.

Some good was done here, but when the doctor expended his final breath, those that took over his work proved to be like vile, toxic vines covered with pleasant but deadly blooms. These new masters sounded deeply concerned for their charges, their dedication to carry on the dreams of the too-trusting founder who had hired them unshakable. But within the noble facade, they carried out their true desires, and used the inmates for their own dark purposes. The blackness of their hearts began to permeate the very walls until at last they were exposed and driven out.

But that was long ago, and now the lawns shimmered peacefully, a verdant halo around a decaying and corrupted crown.

And no one saw this beauty or recalled first-hand the ugliness, except one. A remnant. Someone brought there for one reason and kept there for another. One who should never have been there in the first place, but having arrived, never left.

I

The laughter was what he remembered the longest and best. He recalled two kinds – the mean, smug laughter of the doctors, and the wild, painful laughter of their patients. He’d long since forgotten the sounds of any other, even though he knew they existed. His father had laughed now and again, but its sound had chased itself away. He only knew it had been accompanied by a smile with no hurt behind it.

He thought about the laughter, about how much he hated it, as he stared through a window covered by wire mesh and spider droppings. As far as the view went, it wasn’t much, but it was familiar and therefore comforting. He’d made a safe path to the outside, but rarely followed it. Inside was what he knew best, inside with its ugly, agonized recollections.Its familiar smells of chemicals, blood, excrement, vomit, sex and death had, over time, become a mixed marriage.

The aromas of the outside were so wonderful by comparison as to be nearly unbearable, so he avoided measuring the inner against the outer. He didn’t want to become enraged by the way he’d been forced to live, nor did he wish to believe that anything better actually existed. To do that, he reasoned, would be to admit his choice to remain in this place had been the wrong one. It would also open him to a greater disappointment than he could accept, should the hope that better people lived out there prove to be no more than a whim of his imagination.

He turned from the window and crossed the large room toward double doors that had fallen from their hinges. The floor was a three-dimensional mosaic of debris, none of it recognizable as part of anything that made sense. Just bits and pieces, scraps of lives torn apart years ago, their vacant human shells shoveled into the furnaces to be purified into a form of matter called ash. Everything else was left as small obstacles that discouraged walking barefoot.

Out in the corridor, metal ductwork that had fallen through the acoustic ceiling tiles leaned at lazy angles against tan walls sporting skirts of mold along the lower parts and sweeping upward in the corners. He stepped with practiced ease over, under and around these barriers, heading toward the far end where the generator for this floor was housed.

He knew better than to switch lights on in any of the rooms with windows, but the inner offices where the doctors would hold consultations, or relax with smuggled-in bottles of alcohol kept in locked lower drawers of their desks, or pass the time raping an inmate because he or she would never be able to complain or report it – here there were no windows, and he’d cleaned out a few of them to make living quarters for himself, although how far in his past he’d accomplished this he couldn’t have said. So he’d needed light and the air-conditioning that had eventually replaced fans in the summer, light and heat in the winter, and just light the rest of the time.

When he was very young, one of the janitors had let him watch repairs being made to this same generator that had continued to provide his environment by powering every upgraded bit of technology installed over the years. And thus he’d become proficient at keeping it maintained.

A detached door with a one-way mirror embedded in its upper half was braced against one of the adjacent walls, and as he went by, he glanced at his image. He always did, but never for very long. His reflection disturbed him, mostly because it never changed, but he’d glance over at himself anyway on the off-chance something might be different. And as always, upon seeing that nothing was, he recited that oft-repeated expression, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” He had to wonder, though, if it applied in his case, because things had been done to him, things that were supposed to make him change, only it hadn’t happened yet.

The mirrored door behind him, he arrived at the room with the generator and reached for the knob – this was one of the only doors in the entire asylum that was still in place and functional – but before he could touch it, a loud crash came from somewhere downstairs and he froze. He knew every item in this place, knew what was likely to fall over and what was not. He also knew the sounds of the building’s slow death and was ready for the day it would finish its collapse, taking him with it. This sound was unfamiliar, inexplicable, and perversely, more frightening than the inevitability of his being killed by the asylum caving in on top of him.

He made his way as silently as possible toward the stairwell in the hallway running parallel to the one with the generator. The door was gone but he remembered what it had looked like – solid metal with a small window, and the words “Stairwell Two C” stenciled in white on a dark brown, shiny surface. He had no idea what had become of it, nor did he care. The lightless opening gaped at him, daring him to risk navigating what lay beyond. Not much of a dare, really, since he knew these stairs as well as the rest of the place. Once the backstairs area of the house (when it was still a house), it had become one of many ways to travel between floors after the conversion from mansion to asylum. The walls had been reinforced with dull, cold cement, the wooden steps replaced with noisy iron ones.

No sound was detectable at first as he eased downward in the dark, his old sneakers depriving the metal of its voice. When he was almost at the bottom, he distinguished something softer, something familiar yet completely strange. A laugh of some kind…giggling. That’s what it was called. Not like the mad giggles of demented inmates that spoke more of sorrow than of mirth. No, not like that at all. Odd that he’d been thinking about laughter only a short while before. He frowned and came down the rest of the way, curiosity pushing away fear.

There. Again. A girl’s voice, he was certain. He peered around the doorframe, but saw only what he always saw – a corridor decorated by the chaotic hand of neglect, no single object related to another, and none of anything fully intact. Nothing more. Until he heard the whispers. People who were severely demented did a great deal of whispering. But like the giggle, this was different from what he’d come to define as whispering, mainly because more than one voice was involved. Partly because he had no trouble differentiating what he was hearing from the whispers he often had to deal with in his own head. The latter were mere sound-ghosts. The former were real and not very far away. He stepped out into the corridor, drawn to the trespassers by a need he could neither deny nor control. He also couldn’t explain it, but it hadn’t yet occurred to him that he needed to, so he kept moving forward.

The voices became fainter; he increased his pace, determined to at least see who these people were. At the next junction of hallways, he looked to the left one – the right was completely blocked both by part of the ceiling that had lost its battle with decay, and by all the things it had once held up: beds mostly, a table or two, some chairs, cabinets. None of these had survived the crash very well, and in time had simply rusted or rotted into a mish-mash of incomprehensible shapes he never bothered to try and clear away. The left-hand hallway, however, led to the one place he was most reluctant to go. Outside. Whoever had come in was going away, and he felt he should be relieved, but wasn’t. He wanted to see who they were. Had to, in fact. So he followed.

At the next junction was the opening to the kitchens. He had worked hard to make a path through discarded, bent steel tables, filthy cookware, broken china and crockery, and several refrigerators stinking of dead food because their doors neither opened nor shut all the way. This path branched off in two directions; the left one led to what had once upon a time been something called a mud room, but which the hospital staff had converted into the space where trash was stored before being hauled out to the larger bins behind the building. From there, the sanitation workers of a more recent era had removed the dented receptacles and dumped their unsavory contents into trucks backed into the area by way of a narrow driveway between the back door and a grassy courtyard.

Nearing this small, windowless chamber he finally saw what had caused the crash he’d heard. Someone had bumped into a steel sink that had become detached from the wall several years ago, and which was only upright because it had an inverted table against which to lean. It couldn’t have taken much of an impact to knock it over, but its fall would of necessity have been loud.

He sighed, chose to ignore it for the time being, and went to the small door. It was open an inch or two, and he pushed it the rest of the way so he could look out. At first it seemed they had left and he would have gone back inside, but a flash of something moving caught the corner of his vision. He turned toward it in time to see a girl who had been starting to head around the drive to the other side of the building. Whether or not she sensed his presence was irrelevant. What mattered was that she stopped and turned around.

He stared, paralyzed. She was young, perhaps eighteen or so, with gorgeous light-brown hair that swung away from her in a breeze, then wrapped itself back around her shoulders and throat. He could see her eye color even across the distance between them – light blue – and her features, which were even and attractively proportioned.

She put her head to one side, any shock or fear she might have been experiencing at the sight of someone else in this horrible, deserted place erased by interest. She came close enough to be heard and smiled. “Hello. Um, what are you doing here?”

A second girl, someone with short reddish, curly hair, returned from around the side of the building and began whispering fiercely into the first girl’s ear, who impatiently waved at her to be silent.

He still didn’t move closer, but now he wanted to. Only…what would he say? To answer her question would be to invite trouble, this born more of instinct than certainty. But to say nothing would cause unwelcome suspicion. He cleared his throat. “I – I used to live here.”

“Really? Were you a – hold on. That isn’t even possible! You aren’t old enough! I mean, the asylum has been closed for over thirty years, and you’re what – nineteen? Twenty?” She shook her head, exasperation distorting her mouth.

He shrugged because he didn’t know the answer. This was also the first time he’d heard anything about how long the place had been standing unused. He never bothered to count days, but after some quick figuring he realized that if this girl was right, he had to be at least….well, he’d come there with his father shortly after his mother had died when he was six…he wanted to ask her the year. That would be the only way he’d know for sure how old he was now.

The Asylum had first opened its doors in August of 1904, and he’d arrived two years later. A lot had happened on the outside since then. The garbage trucks, for instance – they had been drawn by horses then, but had changed later into strange, self-propelled monsters that had frightened him. And machines began to fill the skies at some point that made the air pop when they passed overhead, but eventually they only produced a high-pitched whine.

From the windows he had seen other vehicles out on the distant roadway, vehicles that started out a uniform black, bulky, but which soon sped by in every color imaginable, and sleek, too fast to explain, their numbers increasing each year. Clothing, too, had undergone bizarre changes. In fact, the outfit this girl was wearing was unlike anything he’d yet seen. Some kind of leggings, a layering of wide-necked, flimsy shirts covered with a leather jacket, and pointy-toed, ankle-high boots with tall, narrow heels. Her hair was beautiful, but tumbled about her in a way that during his childhood would have been considered unruly.

“I don’t know how old I am,” he finally admitted. “But I once lived here and know it isn’t safe inside for you. You should go and not return.”

“What are you doing here, then?”

He had no answer. “What year is this?” Might as well ask. It probably didn’t matter what she would think about that.

“Seriously?” She uttered a short laugh and told him.

His eyes widened. If she was being honest – and he had no reason to imagine she was not – that would mean his age was…he swallowed hard, not at all happy with the number. The experiments they’d done had apparently worked but more than ever he found himself wishing they hadn’t. Oh, he could never tell this girl his age now. For one thing, she wouldn’t believe him, but on the very slight chance she did, she’d probably tell others, and he would no longer be able to stay in the only home he knew.

“I have to leave.” He took a step back. “Thank you for talking to me.” Before she could react, he had gone back inside, pulling the door shut and locking it. “Well,” he said to whatever energy might be listening, “seems I’m a little older than I’d thought.” At least he didn’t feel that old – yet. At some point it would all catch up with him, he knew. Those changes he kept looking for would one day begin to manifest themselves. After that, they would accelerate until he fell to dust.

Judging by how he currently looked and felt, though, he suspected it would still be a while before that happened. After all, he reasoned, one hundred and twenty-two wasn’t all that old, was it? But no one had told him how much longer he was supposed to live once he’d stopped aging, and the doctors who had played God with his life were gone without leaving any clues.

He’d looked long and hard for something – anything at all – that would answer that simple question, and had discovered nothing more helpful than several notebooks filled with numbers and Latin words. Neither was scratched onto the page by their writer’s fountain pen with any key as to their meaning, or any notation that they might somehow relate to each other. He wasn’t stupid, but he wasn’t smart enough to figure out that particular puzzle. How unfair. Too bad they hadn’t experimented on a genius.

Hoping the curious girls wouldn’t return, he went back upstairs. Springtime could twist itself without warning in either direction – terrible warmth or painful cold – and that generator had to be functioning at its best to get him through those changes. He started to enter the room once more, but again his hand was stayed, this time by a distraction of his own choosing.

He went to the mirrored door and frowned at himself. He could only see how he looked from the waist up, but knew the aging process had ceased for him when he was twenty-one, at which time he’d been weighed and measured, and found to be six-foot-one and a hundred and sixty-eight pounds. What the mirror did show was a well-muscled frame, a face that wasn’t outstanding yet quite pleasant nonetheless, straight, dark brown hair that had been poorly cut making it accidentally stylish (something he would learn later), and deep green-blue eyes that could only be described as haunted. Whatever those experiments had killed of the boy he’d once been was still there as a ghost, wandering through the shadows of his psyche, hissing at him in the small hours of the morning when he couldn’t sleep, screaming at him from his own eyes when he allowed himself to slow down long enough to gaze into that mirror to check for changes, prodding his heart to remember that at one time he had been a normal human boy. He made a habit of ignoring it every time, eventual familiarity with its ways strengthening the barrier between him and his former self.

Well, nothing had changed between his earlier glance and this one. He had no wish to continue disturbing himself, so he went back to the room housing the generator and opened the door. The machine rattled at him, the sound comforting. He offered a close-mouthed smile as tribute and thanks before opening the side panel to check its inner workings. Rather like the doctors used to do to him all the time, he thought absently, checking one of the switches that looked a bit loose. The big difference, of course, was that the generator never screamed.

II

“He shouldn’t be there, and I don’t believe him that he ‘used’ to live there. I think he lives there now, and that’s…creepy. You should do something about it.” She tucked annoying strands of hair behind her ear.

“Did he seem threatening, miss?”

“No, but it’s weird. That place is a death-trap, and maybe he’s a homeless guy, a derelict or something.”

“I see. When was this?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Did he appear to be on drugs?”

“How would I know? I mean, yeah, his eyes were a little disturbing, but he spoke clearly. I think.”

The officer raised his brows. “What does that mean?”

“Well, he sounded like he wasn’t used to talking to people. You know, hesitant, and he – okay, this is what really made me come here to report him. He asked me what year it was and said he didn’t know his own age. Tell me that’s normal.”

“No, not normal.” Sitting back in his chair, the officer reached out and tapped a key on his computer. He stared at what appeared on the screen, touched a few more keys lightly with one finger, and nodded. “Okay.” He looked over the top of the monitor at the girl, smiling. “We’ll take care of this. Thanks for coming in.”

She recognized his dismissal and stood. “Thanks. Hey, could you let me know what happens?”

“Don’t worry - ”

“I’m not worried. That’s not why I asked. There’s just something about the guy…” She shrugged, shoving her hands into the pockets of her short leather jacket, causing her elbows to stick out. “I need to know he’s okay, that’s all.”

“I’ll ask. Leave your name and number at the front desk.”

She rolled her eyes. “I already gave you guys that information when I filled out that report-form thingy.”

He stared.

“Fine. I’ll give them my info.” She offered a brief smile, not necessarily a friendly or grateful one, and left.

The officer sat down again and double-checked the schedule he’d been reading. Looked like he and two others would have time between mandatory obligations to go to the old asylum and see what this girl was talking about. He got up and headed to the police captain’s office. He’d need permission, of course, and possibly some back-up. As a child, he’d attempted to break in on a dare; to this day, he was convinced there was someone or something still in there. So no way was he going to follow up the girl’s report without at least a couple of other officers. Because if ever there was a real haunted building anywhere on earth, Weatheridge Asylum was it.

Behind the huge kitchen were three massive pantries and one gigantic freezer. The doctors who took over the asylum after Dr. Jonathan Weatheridge passed away, quickly realized that they could make far more money from the families of the inmates than by raiding the asylum’s accounts. Once those funds were gone, there would be no way to maintain the facility, which meant no more income…no more power. Instead, they increased the fees, especially for long-term inmates. Those residents who would be there for a month or less for specialized treatments were only charged twenty-five percent more; they had personal doctors and psychiatrists keeping tabs on their progress, and were paying their own way.

The others came from families that had given up entirely, who gladly handed over the sum and substance of their embarrassing relatives’ estates, even large portions of their own, to make certain these disturbed individuals could be locked away forever, presumably cared for until their bodies caught up with the dead state of their minds.

This simply meant that the vast inheritance bequeathed to the asylum by Dr. Weatheridge was more than enough to keep the place running, the utilities paid, various supplies maintained in their inventory, and stocked with abundant food, canned, boxed, bagged, with shelf-lives that were longer than those of the humans they fed. Fresh meat, fish and produce were delivered weekly and kept in the freezers and refrigerated rooms, but when the asylum was shut down, and long before its lone remaining inmate had gotten the electricity running again without the help of the public utility company, everything fresh was basically compost.

It had taken him weeks to toss all of it into the furnaces; the contents of the smaller refrigerators couldn’t be gotten at because they had been padlocked. He’d removed the hinges, but still couldn’t open them all the way, so gave up after a while. When he was done getting rid of everything else, he took stock of the items in the pantries and found he had enough to keep himself alive for decades and beyond.

The day after his encounter with the young girl, he stood in the largest of the three pantries trying to decide what to have for lunch. A necessity more than a pleasure, eating had at last become a chore. He’d managed to get one element working on a small electric stove in one of the offices he was occupying, and was thus able to have hot meals every night. These meals came from a can and tasted like it, and he’d grown tired of pasta and rice. The water in which he cooked them came from pipes that flavored the liquid with copper and sulfur, and no amount of sauce could mask that taste. Bad enough he had to endure it in his tea and coffee.

The wine and other alcohol left behind by the doctors had been finished many years before. An entire week was spent in being stupidly drunk, his woes shoved sloppily aside while the wine and liquor lasted. He’d hurt himself on debris during his personal bacchanalia but hadn’t cared at all. When he sobered up, he found he’d apparently stitched several wounds closed but couldn’t remember doing it. The thin scars with their unevenly spaced rows of holes from the needle and thread faded to nearly nothing over time. He knew where they were, though, and sometimes looked at their faint tracery for entertainment.

Not today. Today he needed to eat something. He’d been too upset the night before to bother. That girl. What would happen now that somebody had seen him? Had she believed his lie about having once lived here and its false implication that he no longer did? Would she tell anyone? He didn’t want to think so.

“Tomato soup.” He said this aloud, reaching for a can with a generic black and white label. “Delicious.” Awful. It was condensed and he’d have to add water. He put the can back. On the shelf below he considered a row of products that required only heat. Chicken and Dumplings. Beef Stew. Chili with beef. Chili without beef. Chop Suey. Chicken Chow Mein. Shrimp Chow Mein. The line of possibilities ended with Corned Beef Hash.

Maybe the other pantry should be explored.

He walked out, stepping absently over a pile of twisted metal that had probably been a utensil shelf once. He would have moved it out of the way, but there really was nowhere to put it.

“Holy shit, she was right!”

Preoccupation with lunch choices had prevented him from hearing the back door being jimmied open, or the crunch of footsteps across enough of the kitchen to bring the police officers near the pantry. He whirled around, horrified, and began to shake. Who were these people? The police? What did they want with him? What were they doing in his home? What had that girl told them?

“Hey, kid, what, uh, you don’t belong in here. This place has been condemned.”

And well it should be, he thought, but didn’t respond.

“Are you okay?” The officer came closer. “Look, we don’t want to hurt you. We’re here to help.”

Oh, yes. That’s what the doctors had always said. Smiling, too. Then, having fooled their victims with this viciously false assurance, they would grab the poor fool who’d entered this place, knock him out with ether, or as they began doing forty-five years later, inject him with Thorazine or something worse, strip him, strap him to a cold metal table, and roll him off into an operating room for use in one of their experiments.

“Go away.”

“Can’t do that, kid. You’re gonna have to come with us. You have a family?”

“Leave me in peace.” I’m not a “kid.”

The expression that came over the officer’s face made it clear that those words sounded odd to him. “What?”

“Shit, who talks like that?” muttered an officer behind the first one.

A third policeman came forward. “Come on, come with us, please. You can’t stay here.”

“Why not? I’ve been here too long to leave now. It’s all I know. Please don’t ask me to go.” The dark look in his eyes intensified. His ghost was shrieking.

“Hey, ease up,” the first officer whispered to the others – there were three besides himself. “He’s obviously terrified.”

He could have run. He knew this place so well, no one would ever find him. In fact, that was how he’d avoided detection when the asylum was closed down. How he’d avoided discovery when vandals had come through at various times causing most of the destruction throughout the building. Time, of course, had done the rest, and didn’t care that he was there.

So he could have hidden himself safely away. But he knew that he’d never be left alone after this. They’d keep coming back. Searching. Scaring him. Giving him no peace. No freedom to wander this place of self-confinement. This was suddenly no longer his safe haven, his asylum from the outside and its mysteries. Resistance and flight no longer had a purpose.

“Never mind,” he said quietly. “I’ll go with you.”

His arrival at Weatheridge Asylum had been in a horse-drawn hansom cab that had to vie for space on the narrow streets with increasing horseless-carriage traffic. Since his father didn’t trust anything that claimed to be propelled by electricity or steam (other than trains in the latter case), he’d never ridden in an automobile either. Until this day.

Parked outside the back door was a patrol car. He stared at the compact vehicle, at its official decals and stripes of gold against dark, metallic blue, then at the interior of the back seat when its rear door was opened for him. It looked…comfortable. Not in the way something familiar would be called that, but physically, yes. This didn’t surprise him. People wouldn’t use these things so much if they were not. A gentle nudge by one of the officers reminded him that he was supposed to get inside. He wasn’t sure how to do that.

“The door is small,” he said, leaning down a bit.

“What do you mean?”

He straightened. “Could you show me how to get inside?”

The officers exchanged looks that might have meant anything, but he suspected they were having a hard time understanding or believing that he didn’t know how to properly enter an automobile.

The officer who had first spoken to him opened the front passenger door and got in.

“Ah.” Now it was easy if awkward.

His door was shut, the second policeman went around to the other side and got in next to him in the back, while the third slid into the driver’s seat.

So much…too much…the quiet hum of the motor wasn’t startling, but the crackle of a muffled voice that belonged to none of the officers and coming from somewhere near the front most definitely was. Then there was the speed…the completely transformed streets…so much traffic…huge vehicles looking as if they would devour the smaller ones in front of them…people – all ages, hundreds of them, it seemed – and signs. Everywhere. Some even glowed, confusing him further. Most of them made no sense to him. Wireless what? Mobile…phones? Amber Alert? He closed his eyes, longing to go back to the asylum, a child needing his mother.

“Are you okay?”

He jumped slightly, having momentarily forgotten someone was sitting beside him. His eyes flew open. “No.”

The vehicle slowed, surrounded now by others like it. Ahead, a massive building loomed, a structure unlike any he’d seen before. Cement to glass, glass to steel, the entirety of it white, shining, taller than the landscaped trees around its base. So this was where the constabulary did its business now? The door opened beside him, but he was unaware, too engrossed in staring up through the windshield on the other side of the glass partition separating back seat from front.

“You, er, can get out now…hey! Hello?”

He responded to the nudge on his arm, hauling his gaze back down and then up again to the face of the policeman. “I beg your pardon?”

“You can get out of the car.” The officer spoke slowly this time, enunciating his words carefully.

Not helpful speech. Sarcasm. He recognized it as such but said nothing of it as he clambered out, clumsy in reverse.

They brought him in through steel-framed glass doors. On the other side was an odd device that reminded him of the conveyor belt that had been installed in the asylum cafeteria so plastic plates, cups and flatware could be brought efficiently into the kitchen where they were thrown away by those who wouldn’t fling them against the walls. Next to this machine stood a large policeman whose face seemed incapable of holding an expression of any kind. And adjacent to these was an arch. He was told to walk under it which he did, wondering why, and then was led to another area where men and women sat at desks, each with those strange objects that looked like televisions with what would have been typewriters in front of them, except that the keyboards were attached to nothing. Computers, but more alien to his eyes than the few acquired by the asylum in later years.

After passing through this section, they took him to a room with a metal table and a few chairs, nothing else. His eyes searched quickly, fearfully, for cabinets that would hold medical instruments and found nothing but walls.

“Have a seat.”

He nodded and sat at the table. They left him alone for a short while, during which he refused to let himself think. What would be the point? He’d lived too long to care much about the opinions of Worry.

The door opened and a woman in a skirt he deemed indecently short entered. She was carrying some kind of case and a curious smile. The case was set on the table, the smile set more firmly, as she sat opposite him. “Good afternoon.”

Manners might still matter, he thought, so he responded in kind.

She opened the case and removed something that was silver, slightly rectangular, and flat. The top part was pulled upward, opening it and revealing an inverted apple etched in the shiny surface. He couldn’t see what was inside, of course, but heard a small chiming sound, followed by some kind of light that tinged the woman’s face faintly blue.

“What’s your name, sweetheart? I’m afraid no one has thought to ask you that yet.” Raised eyebrows pulled the smile’s corners further up.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Dr. Elyse Franco.”

A psychiatrist…no, psychologist. That fit better. He’d certainly known enough of both to recognize the difference. “What are you going to do to me?” He contained the fear with considerable effort.

“Do to you?” She uttered a short laugh of surprise, and for the first time, her expression was genuine. “What do you mean, hon?”

God, I’m so much older than you it’s ridiculous! Stop calling me condescending names! “Where will you take me?”

“That all depends on what you tell me. But before you tell me anything else, please tell me your name.”

“I don’t remember it.”

She stared for a moment, confusion, suspicion, disbelief and concern all vying for attention with her facial muscles. “I…I don’t understand. Why don’t you remember your name? Did you have a head injury?”

He wanted to laugh. Head injury…that had been the least of his wounds. “I don’t have amnesia, if that’s what you mean. I can’t remember my name because I haven’t used it in many, many years.” As soon as he said this, he remembered that he didn’t look like he’d had that much time during which to forget. He shrugged, watching her react to the apparent discrepancy with what she believed was real.

“I see,” she said at last. “Well, what kind of, of identifier have you been using?”

“A number. I’m P-710.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Patient Number Seven Hundred and Ten.”

She nodded, only a little less confused. “Where were you a patient?”

“The Weatheridge Asylum.” There was no lie he could think of that would get him out of this. He didn’t know enough about the current world to formulate one.

She didn’t say anything for a while after that, but began making tapping noises on the other side of the device. It sounded to him like someone typing, but without the clatter of a typewriter.

“Do you think you might have a family somewhere?” she asked a long several minutes later.

“I don’t know.” How could he? His only link back then with family had been his father, and after the man’s unexpected death, no one had come to the asylum to claim him. To rescue him. “I remember my father’s name, if that helps.”

“It might.” She was frowning again. The false smile, it seemed, had been banished for now.

“Dr. Frederick Colson. He was a clinical psychologist who worked with Dr. Weatheridge when the asylum was founded.”

“I see.” What Dr. Franco saw, he guessed, was how the math didn’t work with the evidence of her eyes. “Give me a moment, please.” She began the tapping once more, her frown deepening, leaning closer to whatever was on the other side of that lid. Some time later she sat back and took a deep breath. “There was a Dr. Frederick Colson employed at Weather- idge back then. He was married, but his wife died two years after the place opened. They had a son named Maxwell.” She watched him, her gaze narrowed in anticipation of his reaction.

He looked away, hoping she couldn’t detect the sudden emotion that almost overwhelmed him. Max Colson. That’s who he once was. Only Maxwell when his father was annoyed with him, but normally and to everyone else, to himself, just Max. My God, he thought, how had I forgotten that?

“Max?”

The immediate return of his gaze to hers in reaction was completely involuntary, answering her suspicions, he was sure. But what questions would follow? And how deep would be her disbelief that he could be that same boy?

“What happened to your mother?”

Not what he’d expected her to ask. ”She died.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. She kept getting more and more frail, and had a hard time breathing most days. She coughed a lot, too.”

“Was there blood?”

He shrugged. “I got sent out of the room every time she’d start, so I can’t say. But one night she went to sleep and never woke up.” He remem- bered that well enough, wished he didn’t, and almost shut down.

His distress must have been obvious. “Max, are you all right?”

Indignation was rearing its head. Mr. Colson to you, madam, he almost said…P-710 almost said. Laughable, that. “No, I am not. You’re making me recall things I had happily forgotten.”

“Like your name?”

“No.” He sighed. “I’m glad you reminded me of that, I suppose.”

Dr. Franco nodded and looked back at the object in front of her. “Did you ever hear of lung cancer?”

“Not specifically. But I know what lungs are, of course, and the cancer is a common and deadly disease.”

“Oh.” She was frowning again, but he had no idea why. “How did your father die?”“I was told he was in some kind of accident. One of the new electric cars…they said the driver lost control and it struck him as he was walking in front of some shops. I believe he’d gone out to purchase a few things for the hospital – carbolic acid, pine tar, things like that for cleaning.”

“That – that’s very sad. I’m sorry, Max.”

“You don’t have to keep using my name. It won’t make me relate to you any better.”

She looked taken aback. “So you know something about psychology!”

“Quite a bit. My father used to read to me out of his texts, especially one by James…um, William James, I believe.”

“What was the title?”

“If I’m not mistaken, it was Principle of Psychology. Father said it had been published about twelve years earlier. He’d read it before, but hadn’t owned a copy until he began working at the asylum and could afford to purchase one.”

“So you wanted to follow in his footsteps and become a psychologist, too?”

“I might have. I don’t remember.”

She glanced at her device once more, then closed the lid. “May I be completely honest with you?”

No, lie. Please. “I would hope you’d be honest, yes.”

“You have a knack for expressing yourself like someone from another era, and know things about Dr. Colson and his family that – well, you could have read about them, then imagined what their lives were really like so that your story sounded genuine. But Max, if in fact that’s your name, what you suggest simply is not possible. Dr. Colson lived over one hundred years ago, and you’re what - ”

“One hundred and twenty two.”

She compressed her lips into a line of pity.

“I was used for an experiment, Dr. Franco. I stopped aging when I turned twenty-one.”“Oh, Max. Look, until I know for sure, I’m going to have to recommend you be sent to one of our institutional residences for people with – “

“No. Kill me instead. I will not live like that again!” He had risen to his feet, his eyes darkening with something that was closer to fear than anger.

“How can I believe your story?”

“Research, doctor. Do some research. Find the list of doctors who worked at Weatheridge over the years and see if there’s a sourcebook that describes their efforts there. None of it will tell the whole truth, of course, but perhaps enough will come to light to give credence to my claims. Two of the early ones were geneticists, uh, Dr. Claude Ferenc, and I don’t recall the name of the other. Later on, a lot of doctors from Germany and France took up residence there as well. Find out who they were. Then read why the asylum was closed down. About the way they treated the patients. And try to find the logs of the people committed for long-term care. You’ll see my name there, and that I was diagnosed – falsely – with the condition they had recently begun to call schizophrenia. What it won’t tell you, however, is that at the time I was committed, I was eleven years old. I had discovered some of what was going on after Dr. Weatheridge died, had caught some of the doctors in the act of torturing patients. Soon after, my father died – and to this day, I’m convinced it was not an accident. Instead of sending me away, they committed me, locked me up in a cell and gave me a number. After that, I never heard my name spoken – until today. You’ll also see that P-710 was still there undergoing treatment until they were shut down. Please. I cannot go through anything like that again.” He had begun to shake and had to sit.

Dr. Franco didn’t seem to know what to say to all that, but it was clear her thoughts were spinning almost faster than she could address each of them. But then her eyes softened. “My God, Max, that isn’t how things are done. The place I’m talking about is beautiful, comfortable, staffed with people who genuinely care and want nothing more than to see their patients get well.”

“Is it, is it really? Because that’s exactly the way they once described Weatheridge Asylum. All those compassionate, caring doctors who would look a patient in the eye and smile, assuring him with gentle words and soft tones that he was safe with them. Then as soon as he relaxed, would inject him and take him off to one of the operating rooms where the only evidence of his miserable existence was the sound of his screams. His and the others’ being eviscerated or worse. The women were used for experiments designed to find viable ways to end unwanted pregnancies, and for…other purposes. And all at the hands of doctors who said they cared about their patients.” He lowered his head into his hands, feeling nauseated.

She got up without responding and went out, taking the device with her. As soon as the door clicked shut, Maxwell Colson got up and went to stand by the door, his ear pressed to the crack between it and its frame. As he suspected, she hadn’t gone far, and he could just make out her words as she spoke with one of the officers.

“…understand why he doesn’t trust anyone if what he says is true. Of course, it couldn’t have been the same place – he’s too young.”

“Well, he can’t exactly stay here, and no way is he going back to the asylum!” This voice could have belonged to one of the men who’d brought him here, but he couldn’t be sure.

“I know. God, if only I could show him how different thing are now! How – ha! Listen to me! I’m talking like I believe he was actually there over a hundred years ago!”

“I was,” whispered Max, sinking to the floor, despondent, hopeless.

She was talking again, but he hadn’t paid attention for a few seconds. “…research like he suggested,” she was saying. “Maybe I will discover something that can help him, or be useful somehow.”

“Fine. In the meantime, though, what do you recommend we do with him?”

“He doesn’t seem prone to violence, from what I could tell. Perhaps an assisted living facility, or a foster home of some kind?”

As the man started to reply, they moved further from the door, and Max could no longer hear them. He leaned his head back against the wall, and for the first time in many, many, many years, felt tears sliding from under his closed lids. Guess I’m still human enough to do this, he told himself. Too bad it doesn’t matter any more.

III

In the end, they’d been forced to sedate him. That hadn’t been easy – he’d fought their attempts with a strength that surprised even himself. But Dr. Franco had managed to insert herself between the officers trying to hold him still and jab him with a syringe containing something much stronger than anything he’d experienced before. The reaction was instantaneous; he’d been seconds away from breaking free, and then he was waking up in a soft bed in a room he didn’t understand.

The windows caught his attention first. Curtained with lacy panels pulled aside to display clean, unobstructed glass through which late-afternoon gold poured freely, they were not the windows of an institution as far as he could tell. He sat up and looked around at dark grey-blue walls bordered with thick, cream-colored moldings. A dresser of some light wood faced the foot of the bed next to a door, night stands flanked either side of the bed, and a large desk sat in front of the windows that took up most of the wall beside him. A set of sliding doors was set in the wall opposite the windows, which he guessed was a closet. He was still dressed in his shabby clothes and sneakers; they’d placed him on the bed and left, doing nothing further to him, it seemed. None of this added up to what he knew about being in an asylum.

The door next to the dresser opened. He scrambled back, huddling against the headboard, suddenly terrified. A man wearing a lab coat over his dark blue suit entered, but upon seeing Max’s reaction, stopped.

“Hello, Max,” he said pleasantly but not coming closer. “I’m Dr. Will Garner. Sorry you had to be brought here this way, but they tell me you were being a bit difficult.”

“Yes. I was. Where am I?”

“This is part of City Hospital, actually. The Dorothea Dix Pavilion. It’s an in-patient facility for individuals suffering from various mental disorders.”
Max knew the name Dorothea Dix. “Dr. Weatheridge’s idea was to model his asylum after her hospital in New Jersey.”

Dr. Garner put his head to one side. “Your description of the place when you were talking to Dr. Franco didn’t sound like that of a humane institution at all – quite the opposite, actually.”

“Not at first. That didn’t start happening until Dr. Weatheridge’s health began to fail and he was unable to spend as much time running things. After he died, it turned into what I described.” Although he’d been speaking calmly enough, Max still hadn’t uncoiled himself.

“Well, come on. Let me give you a tour.”

“No. I’m fine right here.”

“You are not. You won’t be, either, until you face this unknown quantity,” Garner said, gesturing at the space beyond the open door. “I also wonder how long it’s been since you ate anything.”

How did that matter? “Last night.”

“Come on, Max. Besides, it’s almost time for dinner. We’ll end the tour with the dining room so you can get something to eat, okay?”

Had the man been talking down to him even a little, Max would have continued to refuse. But he hadn’t, which was impressive, so he took a deep breath, unclenched his body, and got off the bed.

Dr. Garner turned and went out first, telling Max over his shoulder to follow.

Mere minutes later, Max was asking himself how this place could possibly be a mental hospital. It was beautiful, exactly as Dr. Franco had said. Clean, pale blue walls lined with lovely still-life and landscape paintings, gentle lighting, light grey carpeting through all the halls, open areas filled with plants and comfortable-looking seating arrangements, and rooms very much like the one in which he’d woken. A huge room equipped with tables, cabinets containing board-games and other things he couldn’t explain, including what at first seemed to be huge, framed photographs, but which startled the daylights out of him when those “photographs” moved and made sound. Televisions? Really?

And the offices – not very large, but nice, each with the same machines that he’d seen at the police station: televisions and keyboards of some kind. Perhaps he should ask if these were the new version of computers. Perhaps now it was safe enough to ask questions.

The last place was, as promised, the dining room. This, too, was a massive space, and filled with round tables that seated only four, each covered with a pristine white cloth set at juxtaposition over a sea-green one. The plates were odd, though. Not china, but not exactly plastic, and covered with a lovely floral design. Dr. Garner watched him pick one up and examine it.

“What is this made of?”

“You never saw this before?” The doctor might have been surprised, or might have assumed Max was simply continuing his charade of belonging in a different century that hadn’t known melamine.

“We had thin paper or plastic plates and flatware, and the cups were paper. China was too dangerous, I was told. Some inmates felt the need to throw them, so I suppose they were right to use plastic.”

Garner chuckled. “We have some of that here, too, from time to time. So they – whoever ‘they’ are – were right not to use China.” He pulled out a chair and sat. “Please – join me for dinner.”

Max sat opposite, still having a hard time understanding how this could be a place for mad people to be fed. A few minutes later, some of them wandered in, one or two others ran and scooted into their seats as if afraid someone else would try and take them first. Some were muttering to themselves, others talking loudly to no one. And Max experienced a disconcerting onset of deja-vu-like familiarity blended seamlessly with an alien environment. Unlike most people who would find being in the company of these inmates highly unnerving, he began unconsciously to relax. He knew them all by type if in no other way. He’d lived among such, not one of them but as much a part of their horrid existence as if he had been.

A young lady wearing a pretty pink apron over pale green slacks and a floral shirt came to their table holding a clipboard. “Good evening, Dr. Garner!” She gave him a smile that was the most honest thing Max had seen in more than a century.

“Evening, Claire. This is Max Colson. He’ll be staying with us for a while.”

If he expected her expression to change into something less pleasant, he was happily disappointed. She gave him a big grin and put out one hand. “Hi! I’m Claire Allen. Welcome to The Pavilion!”

He took her hand, utterly astounded. “Thank you, Miss Allen.”

“Well! Let’s see.” She looked down at the paper on her clipboard. “Tonight we have New York Strip, flame-grilled to order, with your choice of a baked potato, sweet potato casserole, or fries, and either honey-glazed carrots or fresh corn-off-the-cobb with butter and thyme. If you prefer fish, we also have broiled salmon topped with chopped tomato, chives and lemon-butter, your choice of German potato salad, rice pilaf or macaroni and parmesan salad, and cheesy breadsticks, fresh baby peas and pearl onions, or a spinach salad.”

Max nearly wept. The descriptions alone were beyond anything he’d ever imagined eating before his unjust incarceration, and certainly in a different universe than what he’d been forced to eat afterward. Was there a reason this institution fed its inmates like royalty? Or was such fare only for the benefit of the doctors and whomever might be dining with them? He glanced at the four people sitting at the table next to his. Three of them, he could tell, were patients, the fourth not a doctor but…a male nurse, perhaps?

“What do they usually order?” One answer required for two questions.

She gave him a surprised look, but then said, “Well, Margie – “She pointed toward the only woman with them. “She usually gets the fish, but mostly when the meat choice is pork chops or meatloaf. So she’ll probably get the New York strip. And…let’s see…Mikey only likes vegetables, so we give him enough of each veggie option so he gets plenty to eat. James will probably go for the salmon; he’s been on a health-kick lately.” She giggled. “I’m not sure what their orderly will get. Last time he had the steak, but he’s fairly new, so I can’t really say.” She turned back to Max. “What about you?”

Max swallowed, his mouth already watering with the mere thought of what was being offered. “Steak?”

“Cool. How would you like that cooked?”

He looked at Dr. Garner, shocked. “I get to choose?”

“Yes, Max. As Dr. Franco told you, this is nothing like whatever it was you may have experienced elsewhere.”

He nodded and told Claire that medium would be fine, then opted for the baked potato and glazed carrots. Not that he could let himself believe any of it would be given to him until it was.

“Salmon for me,” Dr. Garner told her. “But you knew that. Uh, spinach salad and rice, and I’m good to go.”

She checked off their preferences and left to take a few more orders before heading back to the kitchen to place them.

Beneath his feet, Max could feel how deeply plush the carpet was through soles that had been worn to the thinness of surgical gloves. Around him, the occasional shrieks were handled with smiles, the shouts quieted with hugs and glasses of water, one inmate’s uncontrollable rocking in her chair halted by the presentation of a stuffed animal into her flailing arms. And dinner was served as promised.

He savored every bite, the first bursting with flavors bringing his tongue to near-orgasmic pleasure, the last continuing to stroke his taste buds with equal sensuality. It took him a long time to finish despite animalistic urges to tear into the food and devour it without breathing. Discipline. That was one of the things that had kept him ironically sane over the years, and what kept him eating at a slow but very human pace now.

Then came dessert. And coffee. Real coffee. With real cream, and sugar in which no bugs had taken up residence. In the end, Max almost felt as if he’d committed a sin or a crime by allowing himself to feel such enjoyment. Almost. Not really. He smiled and sat back, closing his eyes.

When he opened them again, it was to find Dr. Garner smiling back at him. No meanness, no sarcasm, no secret smugness. He was smiling the way Max remembered his father smiling. No hurt behind it.

“I can honestly say I’ve never seen anyone enjoy a meal as much as you just did, Max.” He grinned more widely and stood. “How about a walk? I can show you the grounds, where we bring the patients for exercise, and then we’ll see about getting you some decent clothing and shoes. How ‘bout it?”

As he followed Dr. Garner out of the dining room, he began to suspect that at some point he’d fallen and gotten knocked out, and that this was no more than a dream. Were that the case, he told himself, he hoped he never regained consciousness.

Two weeks passed in this way, and he finally accepted his new reality. During the first week, he was allowed a great deal of unstructured time. Dr. Franco visited him often, and told him his behavior was what was making all this freedom possible. So far, she said, he had exhibited no indications of serious dementia, the only thing keeping him here being his insistence on having been born in 1900.

“You’ll be working with one of our top psychologists on that,” she informed him on her third visit. “We think hypnotherapy might be the answer.”

“You mean ‘therapeutic hypnosis’?”

“I – well, that’s an older term…” She regarded him through a veil of exasperation. “Very smart, Max. And yes, I do. Has anyone ever tried it with you before?”

“No.” He looked away. Dr. Weatheridge had used hypnosis to ease pain. His colleagues hadn’t bothered because pain fueled their sense of power, augmented their ability to control. “I wasn’t being smart, you know. I told you my age. There must be a number of other terms with which I am unfamiliar.”

She sighed. “What am I going to do with you, Max?”“I couldn’t say. But there is something you can do for

me. You can do what I asked you to do the first time we spoke. Research. Look for proof that what I’ve told you is true, or prove it isn’t. Either way, one or both of us will finally know.”

She didn’t visit him after that for a while, and he almost forgot about her. Too many other things, new things among those that would never change, filling his mind with questions, answers, discoveries. He wondered if he was too old to learn about the new technologies that seemed to drive the lives of this current generation. And then he wondered if it was even necessary. He still had no way of knowing when he’d start aging, only that when he did, he’d have very little time after that. Days, maybe. Hours, more likely. So he would die knowing how to use a cell phone? How could that possibly be significant?

The second week had begun with the introduction of a schedule. While he still had plenty of time to himself, he was more or less required to attend private therapy sessions with Dr. Garner and several group meetings that included patients who, like him, were lucid and reasonably articulate. Physical therapy – exercise classes – were also mandated, but he found himself appreciating them immensely. Why not enjoy his still-young body while it remained viable?

The third week he was visited by someone he actually had forgotten about – the girl who had discovered him at the asylum. He was called downstairs from his room during a free period, and asked to go to one of the lounges where visitors, families, could spend unstructured time with the patients. An orderly was normally there to make sure nothing got out of hand, but in Max’s case, none was required.

She was already there when he arrived, standing with her back to him, gazing up at a beautiful painting of dewy hydrangeas hung in a silver frame over the mantel of an electric hearth. He failed to see how such an object had any real purpose, but there it was, and it made the area feel homier. Nice, but hardly worth what it must have cost for the sake of atmosphere.

At first, he had no idea who she was, her back having no distinguishing features he could readily identify. But she heard him approach and turned.

“Hello, again.” She sounded embarrassed.

“Hello.” He offered her a smile and gestured toward the seats. “I recall who you are, now.”

Her hair was bound this time into a kind of unkempt knot at the back of her head, its uncontained ends spiking outward like a barbed-wire halo. She wore black slacks, strappy black and silver sandals, and like the first time he’d seen her, at least three loose shirts in varied shades of blue layered over each other under the short, black leather jacket. “I hope you aren’t angry with me,” she said, sitting on a cushioned chair facing a small sofa.

He waited for her to settle before sitting down, too. “Angry? Whatever for?”

“Well, I reported you to the police.”

“I thought as much.”

“See, you looked…lost. Or something. Anyway, my friend and I had only gone into the building a short way, and could see it was a freaking death-trap, which is why we left, and it worried me to think you were hanging out in there. I mean, I know you weren’t serious about having lived there once. You were living there now, and it scared me to think anyone was wandering around a place like that. So, I called the police in the morning, and they made me come in to fill out a report. I hope this place is okay for you.” She shrugged, unsure if her explanation had been accepted.

“It is. You did what you thought was right. My name is Maxwell Colson. May I know yours?”

She gave him an odd look. “Yeah. I’m Indiana Moore. Anna, mostly.” She blushed for a reason that he suspected eluded her.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Moore.”

“Okay, what’s up with that? You – you say things so strangely! Please call me Anna? I mean, you’re pretty much the same age as me, maybe just a little older, so the ‘Miss’ thing is kinda creepy.” Her discomfiture had obviously and quickly dissipated.

“A lot older. But thank you…Anna. You may call me Max.”

She sat back, muttering his name, and regarded him in silence for a while.

He waited, having nothing else to do, but curious to hear what she would eventually say.

“Are you a crazy person?”

The words were offensive, but he didn’t think she’d meant them that way. “I don’t know. I wasn’t at first, even though I was diagnosed as such. After a while, however, I may well have gone insane.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a very long, unpleasant story. Ironically, the truth of it is what would make you think I am, in fact, a, er, ‘crazy person’.”

She tapped her fingers on the arm of the chair for a few seconds. “Does it have to do with what you just said, that you’re a lot older? Because you sound old. My grandfather talks a little like you. None of my friends do.”

“You’re very good at deductive reasoning.” He also sat back. The conversation having started on this track, it would soon enter the realms of the incomprehensible for her; he wondered how much longer she’d stay after that.

“Meaning what – that I figured out why you’re here and not just in a shelter somewhere?”

“A shelter? You mean like a tent? Is that where people are sent now when they have no homes?” That didn’t sound very compassionate.

“No, a homeless…it’s usually a building set up just for the homeless. They give them food, a place to sleep, and help them find jobs sometimes.” She glanced around the room. “This is much nicer than the shelters, though.” When her gaze returned to his, she smiled. “I’m glad they sent you here instead.”

“Why?”

“Like I told the police, you looked lost. I think you’d be a lot more lost in a shelter. So what makes them say you’re crazy?”

“The truth, it would seem.”

“Which is?”

“That I know for sure I was born in 1900, in July of that year, on the 20th."

She pursed her lips, narrowed her eyes, and said, “So even though you look young, you’re really over one hundred years old?”

“I stopped physically aging when I was twenty-one.”

“How?”

“An experiment. The doctors were doing something with genes, using chemicals to combine them in ways they were never meant to join. They tried this on several other patients, but I’m the only one who survived. Probably because I was so much younger than those who died from it.” His expression hardened. “They started the tests on me when I was twelve, and began the operations about six months later.”

“Did their…whatever it was, did it hurt?”

He couldn’t tell whether she was simply humoring him or actually believed what he was saying, but as with everything else at the moment, it didn’t matter one bit. She was listening without pity in her eyes and that was all he really wanted, after all. “The changes they caused in me didn’t hurt. But they operated without anesthesia, and that did.” He suddenly felt bone-weary, a normal symptom for him when thinking about those years. “It was a very long time ago, though, and nothing hurts now.”

“Except remembering it.”

That surprised him. This young lady was very insightful. She was also quite attractive, something he’d only observed mechanically the first time. He told himself to stop thinking about that. He was too old for her – ah, the world’s biggest understatement, that – and could start physically aging any time. But how nice to have a young lady to speak with. He’d been cruelly deprived of all normal relationships, of meeting a girl and courting her, of enjoying his life as a young man, of marriage and family. How much harm could come of some basic conversation, even if she did think him insane?

“Yes, except that. How wise of you to see it.”

“No, it just makes sense.” She giggled, the utterance that had tracked with his thoughts the day she entered the asylum.

“I’m curious. Why were you there?”

“At that asylum place?” She shrugged. “No real reason. It was Saturday, my friend Christa was bored, and we couldn’t think of anything spectacular to do, so I suggested we go check it out. I’d always wanted to sneak in there to see what it was like inside.”

An elderly couple went past on their way to the elevators. Max recognized them as the grandparents of a young man who could play chess so well, no one (he’d heard) had ever been able to defeat him. Sadly, it seemed to be all he could do. Dressing himself was beyond him, as was controlling his bodily functions, talking, holding a cup. Max was convinced that the lad’s occasional, raucous yells were expressions of deep frustration.

“How could you survive in there?” she was saying. “There’s so much broken stuff laying around. It had to be really dangerous!”

He abandoned thoughts of the chess-player and pulled his attention back to what the girl was saying. The girl who for some reason had been named after a state. “There was no danger for me, er, Anna.” He felt uncomfortable saying her name. After all, he hardly knew her. Another of those changes, then, and he’d have to accept it. “I’d been living there since 1906. There isn’t a single inch of that building that I don’t know. I was there when ceilings fell in, when pipes exploded, when groups of robbers plundered every room for valuable items to steal, and earlier, when they raided the asylum and tore it apart looking for usable evidence of the atrocities that took place there.”

“So, I guess that means you weren’t in any danger of tripping over something unknown, right?”

“Right.”

The orderly from his floor approached from behind them; without turning Max greeted the man. After a lifetime of studying and identifying the sounds of his environment, he easily recognized the man’s tread, specific gait, how he breathed.

The orderly chuckled. “Hey, Max.” He came to stand by the side of the chair. “You did it again, didn’t you.” He was referring, Max surmised, to being so easily recognized.

“Visiting hours over?” asked Anna.

“Yes, miss. Our friend here has to get ready for dinner.” He gave Max a friendly pat on the shoulder.

She stood, Max joining her, put out a hand. “Thanks, Max. It’s been a little weird, but nice, too. May I visit you again?”

Was she serious? “Of course. I’d really like that.”

“Good! But promise me that if I do, you’ll tell me the whole story, okay?” Her eyes, puckering into rays of laugh-lines at the corners, were free of guile as she grinned openly at him.

“If you like.”

“I would. Maybe it would be good for you, too. You know, finally tell someone what happened to you.”
He nodded, speechless. Her voice said she believed him, even if her words said very little of significance.

Then she was gone, the faint scent of her honeysuckle perfume remaining, a lovely floral sonatina he would afterward associate only with her. He turned, his eyes even with those of the orderly, and they went to the elevators in silence.

He had no wish to talk at the moment, choosing instead to think a little further about Miss Moore. About how she might merely be humoring him. But whether she believed him or not, she still wanted to hear what he had to say, and that was sufficient.

IV

Elyse Franco rubbed her eyes, yawned, and reached for the cup of coffee cooling steadily next to her computer. What she’d read about Weatheridge Asylum and the atrocities committed there had made her feel sick. She considered quitting that part of her research, but knew she wouldn’t.

The place had been investigated following the discovery of severe restraint and seclusion abuses in a California state hospital, which had resulted in laws making such behavior a criminal offense. Other states had then started looking more closely at both public and private institutions for the care of physically and mentally disabled persons, including Max’s asylum. What they found after an unannounced inspection of Weatheridge was beyond anything imaginable by reasonable individuals. Torture, rape, murder, human beings treated like lab animals, and almost all of it committed in the name of scientific advancement – or so the perpetrators of these heinous crimes had claimed. Their notes, archives, tissue and blood samples, harvested organs, and every other scrap of pertinent, albeit grisly, evidence were confiscated and sent to a central laboratory in Washington. There, they tried to analyze them, to reconcile their findings with the research these monstrous doctors had been doing. What they found was and remained classified.

She then did a search of the information that was not restricted, and found the list of patients’ names, as well as the number designations they’d been given after being admitted to Weatheridge. Five years after the asylum’s founding, a patient named Maxwell Colson had been committed, his new identifier, P-710. All through the record, up to and including the date thirty-four years ago when the asylum was closed forever, that same number kept appearing on medical logs and records. Something deep within Dr. Franco shivered from an ethereal chill, her instincts flooding every fiber with the certainty that Max had been telling the truth. Still, she knew she wouldn’t be satisfied until she had actual evidence, unarguable proof of his seemingly impossible claims.

She sent off an email to the agency responsible for the items seized at Weatheridge, hoping that the intervening decades hadn’t caused them to degrade or be discarded, that the considerable passage of time made it less vital that these things and the findings about them remain confidential. She needed proof. It was that basic. The records would provide some of it, and if she could get tissue samples directly linked to Patient 710, she could obtain DNA from Max and see if they matched. Yet more than that, more personally satisfying than cold facts, she wanted to hear him describe things no one else could possibly know unless they’d lived in that earlier time, as well as details only a long-term inmate of Weatheridge would possess. She had no time herself to listen, but was determined to somehow get his full story. But how?

"Think, Elyse. Think!" She wanted Max to be sane, she really did. And not only because of what the implications of his case could mean to the world of science; there was more. There was Max himself, who he was or appeared to be. A person who had once endured unspeakable horrors, constant pain and sorrow, yet had survived well over a hundred years and remained good at heart. Was that really him? It seemed that way. After the few short conversations they’d shared, she had come to like him. His personality. His reticent smile. His willingness to accept a world so totally foreign to him in so many ways.

Dr. Garner had told her the day before about a young lady who had begun visiting him. She’d been the one who had discovered Max in the ruins of Weatheridge and reported his presence there to the police. Elyse had dismissed the information as mildly interesting but irrelevant, only now an idea presented itself, and she called The Pavilion to obtain the girl’s name. Yes, a good idea, this. She’d have what she needed.

Max had stopped dreaming decades earlier, a self-defense mechanism, he believed. Too many nightmares had almost killed him, keeping him awake for up to three or four days at a time. When the doctors would inject him with some sedative or other, the dreams had been even worse, made thus by his inability to waken himself. They let him know he screamed a lot on those nights, and grinned when they said it. He had eventually discovered ways to hide, to avoid being used in their tests, and knew that if his nightmares caused him to make noise, they’d find him. So the cessation of those nocturnal terrors had been a matter of self-defense, not just defense. There was a difference.

Now he was dreaming again. This time, he didn’t mind because they were dreams about Anna, about the lovely pathways and gardens on the grounds of The Pavilion, about being able to breathe and not have to mute the sound of it. His waking hours replenished the fuel of his dreams with good, wholesome things. Things that made him laugh to himself, like overhearing one of the orderlies declare that he’d never seen a saner, more normal mental patient than Max Colson, and what the hell was he doing here? Max knew why he was there. To him, sanity, normality and madness were no more than various regions of the same country.

“How so?” Anna asked him one afternoon when he told her his concept.

“Sane people sometimes do mad, crazy things, do they not? Equally, mad people have been known to commit acts of sanity. Thus no one is normal, so everyone is. Like a country – you have customs regarding, oh, food, let’s say. You’d never stray from the way your mother taught you to cook, but then you visit someone in another region and are introduced to new ideas, new ways to prepare food, and you try it. Then they visit you, and the same thing happens to them. So whose way is right?” He watched how her eyes changed as he spoke, enjoying the shifts in understanding he saw there.

“Huh. I never thought of the mind like that.” She grabbed a cushion from beside her on the sofa and hugged it. “Max, would…would you tell me what, I mean, I asked you this before and you said you would tell me about your life. I’m not going to lie and say I’ll believe the whole I’m-a-hundred-and-twenty-two thing, but I have no doubt that you do. So you must have quite a story to go with that.”

“And you really want me to share it with you?”

“I do. I like listening to you, but like I said, I think it might be a good thing for you if you talk about it.”

He knew the psychiatry behind that and smiled an unuttered laugh. “Indeed.” He took a deep, peaceful breath. “I would be delighted. Let’s get some coffee, maybe something to nibble on first, then we can go sit in the garden. It’s a beautiful day, and the story is a long one.”

Beneath their feet, the grass implied brilliant softness, but Max wore better shoes these days and his soles could only experience the darker cushions provided by footwear companies. They’d left the path, cardboard cups of steaming coffee and napkins wrapped around berry-filled muffins in their hands. A massive elm tree was their goal, and the comfortable Adirondack chairs within its lacy shade. Spring was bleeding into summer, deepening the greens, changing the colors of its flowers, letting in more of the sun’s warmth, a house-cleaning event for Mother Nature.

Soon settled, they sipped carefully to avoid scalded tongues, neither hungry enough yet to eat. Anna rested her head against the high slats behind her and closed her eyes for a moment or two. Max watched her, appreciating the smoothness of her skin, the curves of her face, wishing he could be young – her young – in reality. Were that the case, he would probably kiss her, court her, and one day ask her to marry him. She was, in his view, extraordinary. A sweet thought, but only an echo of what occupied his mind at night, nothing more.

He was still looking at her when her eyes opened. Had he not been close to ancient, he might have looked away, embarrassed. As it was, he gave her a happy smile. “Are you ready for this story of mine?”

She took another sip and nodded, in no way seeming to have been disturbed by his attention.

“Very well. Here we go, then.”

*****

“We lived in a small house near the southern outskirts of what then was a large town. I had been born there, and thought I’d live in that place until I was old enough to strike out on my own. Father divided his time between taking courses at the University and a job in the local school where he taught science. Mother took in laundry during the week, and I would watch her from inside one of the gigantic wicker baskets she used for sorting. When I became too big to fit, I began helping her instead. We’d sing a lot, I recall, and she would laugh, tell me stories about places far away. I promised her I would be a teacher like my father some day, and have enough money so we could all go and visit those places. She never discouraged my ideas.

“Then one day she started to cough. Said she’d probably caught a cold from one of her customers when dropping off the woman’s laundry. Neither my father nor I thought much about it until it became obvious the cough wasn’t going away. We had the doctor in, and after examining my mother for a long time, sent me out of the room so he could have a, er, grown-up chat with my parents. At the time, I had no concept of disease or death, couldn’t figure out why my father looked like he was crying sometimes. Mother never indicated anything was terribly wrong, either, but when she became too weak to do any more laundry and had to take in sewing instead, I began to suspect things were worse than anyone had admitted.

“Father, meanwhile, finished his degree, and one evening his friend Dr. Jon came to dinner at our home. That was how I was introduced to him, and being only five, I thought that was his whole name. He was Dr. Jonathan Weatheridge, of course, which I learned after moving into the asylum. My father had met him at some sort of lecture at the University, and they’d become good friends. That night, he was there to offer my father a position at the hospital he was opening in a few months.

“’Dr. Jon is donating his lovely mansion and converting it into a hospital for people who, well, who have a hard time thinking normally,’ my mother explained over dessert. ‘Since your father just received his doctorate in the same field of interest as Dr. Jon, he will be a great asset there.’ She had then looked at my father with the brightest smile I’d seen on her face in months.

“When Weatheridge Asylum opened its doors, we all attended the ceremony. The Mayor and Town Council were there, as were many who lived in the town. Most of the people looked happy, but some appeared angry. I couldn’t imagine why, but of course, as I learned after some years, they were very unhappy with the idea of mad people living in their neighborhood. They feared one or more might escape and commit terrible crimes. I forget who explained that to me, but I do remember it was a woman, and she thought it funny.

“’How ridiculous those citizens are! These patients aren’t criminally insane,’ she said. ‘Just tragic.’ Another explanation that I’m afraid made no sense to me at the time.

“Well, going back some, mother continued to get weaker and weaker, eventually unable to get out of bed, and we had to hire a nurse to live in the house and take care of her all the time. Sometimes her cough would go on and on, a deep, painful sound, and at those times I was sent out of the room. I was, to say the very least, confused and frightened. She couldn’t sing any more, could barely whisper, and she looked so sad all the time…

“A week or so after my sixth birthday, I was brought into her room to say goodnight. She kissed me and said, ‘You must promise to always help your father. Be patient with him and do as he says. Love him and give him your heart and your respect, and you shall live a peaceful life.’ Her voice, for some reason, had returned to its normal strength, and foolishly, I thought she was getting better. I promised, naturally, kissed her goodnight, and never saw her again. She died during the night; when I woke up the next day, I knew. No one said anything to me at first, but I knew.

“After the funeral, father told me the house would be put up for sale, and that I would be going to the asylum to live with him there. He had a small suite of rooms near Dr. Jon’s personal part of the hospital, which if I’m not mistaken had been his actual bedroom suite when the hospital was still his house. Father’s rooms were once three adjacent servants’ quarters, the walls between them partially broken down to make an arched doorway from one to another, a door placed in the second wall to give access to his bedroom. I was to sleep on a large leather sofa in the first room, the one in the middle having been converted into a small kitchen and dining room.

“Leaving the house wasn’t that difficult, really. Without mother, it was a shell haunted by her echoes. I suppose I didn’t want to be there at all. But the asylum, while strange at first, was very nice. I came to know the doctors and nurses, spent a great deal of time in the library, and when my father’s hours were his own, he and I would read from his texts together so he could explain the meanings of all those terms and phrases about psychology and psychiatry. About the human mind. About why the greatest minds in the field believed people went mad.

“Everyone soon got used to seeing me wandering about, and eventually, I believe, I became…invisible, I guess one could say. They’d see me and dismiss me almost simultaneously. Ah, Dr. Colson’s boy. Now, where was I… That sort of thing.

“One day, I was approached by a patient. He was usually very gentle, a quiet man with grey hair, a mustache, and a broken front tooth. His name, I think, was Philip. I’d seen him shuffling back and forth in the recreation room but had never spoken with him. This day, though, he walked up to me in one of the hallways and gave me a huge smile.

“’You’re not one of us!’ he said with all the expression in his voice that was missing in his eyes. ‘But you will be. You can’t stay here, little boy, or you will be!’ And then, suddenly, he leaned down closer and roared. Like a lion or some other wild beast.

“I took a step back, but wasn’t frightened. Annoyed. What did he think he was doing? ‘Don’t you make noises at me like that!’ I yelled, standing my ground.

“He blinked a few times, shook his head quickly from side to side as if throwing off a swarm of flies, and started to laugh. Understandably, I assumed this meant he was all right and over whatever it was that had made him behave so strangely. So I laughed, too.

"Next thing I knew, I was on my back staring up at him as he stood over me, fists clenched, head thrown back and screaming. He’d only pushed me down, so I wasn’t hurt, but now I was genuinely frightened. What was this?

“Before I could try to scramble away, two orderlies ran up from behind him and dragged him off. He continued to scream, making it impossible for me to hear something the orderly was trying to tell me. So I got up, brushed off my trousers, and went back to our rooms. I was rather shaken and needed to ask my father about the incident. That was the night I learned about a mental condition called Manic-Depressive Psychosis, a syndrome that in later years would be called ‘bipolar disorder’. This poor man wasn’t insane, and had they known about lithium at the time, he could have been treated and released. Sadly, he remained and became part of the experimentation that had already, in small ways, begun at Weatheridge.

“And now, I think I need to stop for a while. I’m getting tired and need to eat.”

*****

During sessions with Dr. Garner, Max said nothing of his discussions with Anna. Why should he? Nor did he mention it in the group sessions, and for the same reason – there was no purpose in bringing it up. For her part, Anna said nothing of it when Dr. Garner would ask her how things were going with Max; she told Max this, but he’d already surmised as much since the doctor had never mentioned it.

Summer swept in slowly, grandly, its cloak of thickening heat-waves shutting The Pavilion’s windows and raising its electric bills so its residents could stay cool. Max preferred being outside, his young man’s body clad in sleeveless tee-shirts and light-weight, drawstring cotton slacks. Anna always looked enticing now, having shed the leather jacket and layered tops in favor of something skimpy, light, diaphanous. Pastel blues still, sometimes a lemony yellow, and very short shorts that raised observing eyebrows almost as high. She looked very comfortable as she uncon- sciously stimulated every sense that reminded Max he was alive and youthful yet.

By this time, he was seriously considering the possibility of kissing her. A small, sweet kiss. Nothing more, no promises, no committing of hearts. A kiss only. But it took so long to decide, he recognized that when, if, it happened, “nothing more” would immediately turn into “everything.” His body was proving almost too strong for his will to handle. Should he stop seeing her, cease his ongoing, verbal autobiography?

No. She had been right. Psychiatry had been right. He needed to do this. Almost as much as he needed to make love to this girl in the modern sense. In his day, that term was innocence. One “made love” by speaking sweet, poetic nonsense into one another’s ears, a substitute for sex bathed in false purity. He preferred this generation’s more honest definition.

He was nine years old in his narrative by this time and amazed that he’d remembered so many details from one hundred and sixteen years in the past. Anna claimed to be impressed. She couldn’t even remember her own childhood, she said.

“Does that mean you believe me about my age?”

They were sitting on the edge of one of the fountains, bare feet swishing languid wakes over the coins winking up from the bottom. Behind them, the top floors of The Pavilion, flanked by other wings of City Hospital, stood sentinel over the tops of trees in full summer dress. She leaned down and cupped a tiny puddle into one palm and flung it at him playfully.

“No. Not necessarily.” But she was blushing, and he suspected her subconscious had at some point acquiesced. She flicked more water at him.

“Careful, Anna,” he warned, eyes glittering with humor. “Can’t have you falling in. You’d destroy that recording device.”

She stiffened and turned toward him, hitching the nearest leg onto the fountain’s marble border. “You know about that?”

“Of course. I saw you reach into your pocket the first day I began telling you my story, and suspected you were using one. Dr. Garner has a small machine like that, too. He uses it to record our sessions.”

“Oh.” She looked down, shielding her bemusement. “I’m sorry.”

“Why? I don’t mind.”

“No, that’s obvious. What I’m sorry about is hiding it from you. That was dishonest.” She looked back up. Her distress almost undid him.

“Anna, it’s all right. I understand why you’d want to have a record.”

“No you don’t. It isn’t for me. Dr. Franco asked me to do this.”

He swatted absently at a flying insect near his ear. “Did she say what she needed it for?”

“Her research, she said.”

Now he smiled. “That’s all right, then. I asked her to do that. Not record me, but to research the asylum and see if she could find a way to prove what I told her. If it helps her to hear this, then fine.”

The lines of concern disappeared from between Anna’s brows and she gave him a smile of deep relief. So it mattered to her how he felt…

No books that Max had read – and he’d read quite a few, the library at the asylum having been left untouched – had ever explained the kind of impulse that bypassed his well-established resolve at that moment, moving his hands to either side of her face as he leaned forward, making him kiss her without allowing his mind to have a say in these actions.

Like his first meal with Dr. Garner, the flavor and pleasure of that kiss washed over and through him in a mental climax while simultaneously bringing him dangerously close to a physical one. And she was kissing him back, her hands sliding up the front of his shirt, coming to rest on his shoulders. Were they not perched so precariously on the edge of a fountain, the next logical action would have been to lay down and let their desire take them so deep, drowning in water would have seemed like St. Peter’s romp atop the waves.

Something within seemed to jolt them back to sanity at the same time, for they suddenly separated, connected now only through their eyes. They both had to still throbbing breaths before either could speak, and Anna managed to do so first.

“God, Max, I’ve wanted to do that for the longest time!” she breathed.

He swallowed. “Me, too. But…oh, Anna, you’re so much…so young…I shouldn’t even…it…this isn’t fair, is it.” He wasn’t asking.

One corner of her soft mouth curved upward. “What is? I think I do believe you, and I’m also convinced you aren’t crazy. Just beautiful, and wise, and so terribly hurt. I want you to make love to me. I want to hold you that close. I have this awful feeling that one day you’ll be gone. Let me take you inside of me so I can at least have that memory forever.”

He nearly wept. Were there any other human beings as miraculous as this girl? Was she his reward for all the suffering? Could another person be a gift? A final pat on the back before death for having survived so long? How was it possible to see someone in that light without making them less human? He could answer not a single one of those questions, even felt a bit foolish for asking them.

“Max?”

The yearning was what finally broke him down. Hers more than his. He swung off the ledge, his feet leaving the water with the sound of a brief backwash, picked up his sneakers and socks with one hand, and extended to her the other. She joined him and they went deeper into the trees, off the path, to a small glade shaded by many layers of natural canopy.

There, he removed her clothes, then his own, and kissed her again. The pleasure her body gave his hands was beyond description, the sweet taste of her skin feeding his tongue with sensations mere taste-buds would never comprehend. They sank to the ground, her own hands urgently grasping his strong arms as she wrapped herself around him. They moved together for a long, delicious time, far longer than he’d imagined he could last before reaching that pinnacle so vital and magnetic to a man’s being. And when at last they were spent, their craving had somehow been made greater.

They saw each other every day for the remainder of the week, but not to share a story. Only their bodies, their hearts, their boundless desire for one another. He knew it was probably wrong, but was helpless against the power of this primal need and the more sophisticated emotions that accompanied it.

To his relief, she never used the word that frightened him so badly he would have refused to see her ever again had she uttered it. He couldn’t afford to be loved, because he didn’t have the currency with which to love in return. He still hadn’t told her what would happen when what they’d done to him reached it culmination. How or when would he have mentioned it? He was being a coward, he knew. And so be it. As long as she never spoke the word “love,” he could live with that admission.

V

“Soon after I’d turned ten, I happened on something I wasn’t supposed to see.”

They were back to the story, having mutually determined to restrict their desires for a time. Still, as he spoke she had to hide what was in her eyes or they’d be at it again in a heartbeat.

“I was bored one afternoon, having finished my studies and being unable to go outside because of a rather violent thunderstorm overhead.” He scowled, not certain he could tell this part without getting extremely upset. Always before now, he’d been able to think about this incident somewhat coldly, a mortician observing a decaying corpse. But since his involvement with Anna, so many of his own ghosts, those that had once been living emotions, had been miraculously raised from the dead and were refusing to leave him alone.

She reached a hand toward his arm as if to urge him to continue, but pulled it back at the last second; physical contact of any kind would inevitably result in more of the same and then some. He knew this, appreciated her restraint, and continued.

“Certain areas of the hospital, I’d been told, were off-limits for anyone but the doctors. Come to think of it, I wasn’t warned to stay away by my father or Dr. Jon, but by one of the surgeons who I’d found to be unreasonably arrogant and therefore didn’t like very much. Perversely, boredom drove me to completely ignore that directive, and before I could argue myself out of it, I was in the lower section of the north wing. The hospital had a basement and a sub-basement on that end where a rising landscape had made it possible to build these two cellars. I believe wine had once been stored there, Dr. Jon having said something about that during our initial tour of the place. But part of the conversion of his mansion had included turning them into a series of small test labs and rooms for minor surgeries. This was where I wasn’t supposed to go, so that’s exactly where I went.

“Halfway down the stairwell, I began to hear what could only be muffled shrieks and screams. Nothing unusual, considering how much of the same filled the upper regions of the hospital daily. I had concluded that these ear-splitting sounds were a kind of language spoken and understood only by the insane. But my curiosity was piqued, so I kept going. Once out in the hallways, the noise became much louder as one might expect, only now I could distinguish the underlying tones.

"These people were in horrible pain, all of them frightened beyond reason. I went to the closest room and peered in through the window half-way up in the door. At first, I could only see the backs of two doctors standing in front of a table. A pair of feet stuck out past them, and they were twitching. The screams were terrible, but I had to keep looking. Eventually, the doctors moved apart and…oh, God.” The memory zoomed into full focus and slammed with brute force into his newly sensitized emotion centers. He got up, taking slow, deep breaths, willing himself not to retch, as he paced away from where she waited, confused, then returned and sat again.

“Sorry. They had strapped the man to the table, and had cut open his face with an incision that ran from his forehead to his chin, the skin pulled back and clamped to his ears. His mouth was open in an unending shriek of pain as they dripped some kind of chemical on the exposed muscles and into the opening where his nose had been. It took a few seconds for my mind to accept what I was seeing, and then I turned away and vomited. They must have heard me, because the door was flung open and I felt myself being hauled to my feet by the back of my shirt.

“‘What are you doing here, little fool?’ the doctor hissed at me, his mouth next to my head. I was incapable of speech at that point, and then I saw the blood on his gloved hand and threw up again. On his shoes, I believe.” He smiled just a bit at that. “Then he dragged me to the stairwell and told me that if he ever caught me down there again, or if I reported what I’d seen to a single soul, they would do to me what they’d done to the man on the table. I didn’t argue, I couldn’t. I ran up the stairs, tripping upward every few steps, and somehow made it back to my room without anyone noticing my state of agitation.”

“Did you go back?”

“Of course.” He leaned forward, arms on his legs, and stared at the dark green between his feet, the blades stubbled by hospital mowers. “I was always a stubborn idiot.”

“You aren’t an idiot.”

“Yes I am, or I wouldn’t be so stubborn.”

“Can you continue?”

He sat back. “Yes.” After a brief smile meant to encourage at least one of them, he went on. “I never told my father. My plan was to keep investigating without getting caught again. I brought a notebook with me after that, and managed to distance myself from what I saw. I wrote down the names of the doctors and patients involved in each incident, the times, places, and a short description of what they appeared to be doing. Thanks to the content of my father’s texts, I had an unusually extensive medical vocabulary and understanding at my disposal, but the specifics of their experiments were beyond me.

"The study of genetics as a science was still in its infancy then. In fact, the word itself was simply a reference to beginnings, sources, as in the word ‘genesis.’ A man named Bateson used the term for the first time the year after the asylum opened. The term ‘gene’ wasn’t used until the same year I discovered the experiments.”

“Then how could they have been doing genetic tests?”

“The name wasn’t used before then, but the study of traits and how the cells factored into their formulation had been in existence for well over a hundred years already. Mendel did the most definitive groundwork on it, though, about thirty-five years before I was born, and it was on the basis of his studies that genetics became a recognized branch of biological science.”

“I see. Max, if you don’t screw my brains out right now, I’m going to lose my mind.”

“Anna, don’t – “

“Sorry for being crude, for not even making sense, but I can’t stand it. It’s been too long…”

“Oh, hell.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her to him, kissing her ear, her throat, her mouth. “No more for now,” he whispered when he was too near the brink. “Tomorrow. I promise.”

She leaned over and nibbled on his ear. “Tonight.”

“But how?”

She smiled and didn’t answer.

“I hope you turn off the recorder when we talk like this.”

Her smile broadened. “Dr. Franco could use a little stimulation.” Tucking one leg under her on the chair, she raised an eyebrow. “Please go on.”

“’Farewell happy fields, where joy forever dwells: Hail, horrors, hail,’” he muttered through a long sigh.

“What?”

“Milton. 'Paradise Lost.' All right. I continued my spying for about a year, my big plan being to put all my findings into a single report and presenting it to Dr. Jon once I felt there was enough to prove my case. But he got sick, and soon was spending less and less time in the hospital proper, being confined most days to his bed. I tried to see him, hoping to at least warn him of what was happening in his asylum, this place that was supposed to be run with compassion and ethical practices.

"Later, after he died, I began questioning the cause of his demise. How little it would have taken to poison his food; this was a place full of top scientists and doctors with every known chemical and medicine at their fingertips, including substances that would be undetectable soon after being ingested. Anyway, I never did get to see poor Dr. Jon for more than a few minutes at a time while he was ill, and then it was in the company of my father and a few of the very doctors about whom I’d been writing.

“A few months later he died, and Dr. Roskell, I forget where he was from, was named the new Chief of Staff. He set up a Board of Doctors to help him run the asylum, none of whom were the nicer doctors there. My father, too, was excluded, despite his having been on staff from the beginning.

"Shortly after my eleventh birthday, he went out to purchase supplies – he said one of the orderlies had been complaining about rapidly dwindling stores of cleaning materials, suspecting they were being stolen by the non-medical personnel. He wasn’t back by nightfall, and when I went to the main office to ask if anyone had heard from him, I was told that he had been killed in an accident; someone in an automobile had struck him, and he’d died instantly.

“The next day, without allowing me any time to grieve, attend his funeral, or have any time at all to deal with his death, the doctor who I’d first discovered in the basement laboratory came into my room. He dragged me out of bed and pulled me to my desk. There, he removed my notebook and hit me with it, knocking me to the floor.

“’Did you think you were being clever?’ he screamed at me. ‘Did you really think we didn’t know you were there or what you were up to, watching, writing, sticking your ignorant nose where it didn’t belong?’ I was horrified. How had he found out? Then he pulled me up by the front of my pajama shirt, his eyes almost blazing with hatred. ‘I hope you haven’t forgotten my warning. What I said we’d do to you if we caught you at it again. I always keep my promises, boy.’ He threw me back to the floor and went out. I waited a few minutes before trying to leave, but when I did, I found an orderly standing beside the door just outside who growled at me to get back to my room or he’d knock my teeth out.

“An hour or so later, I was taken to one of the isolation cells, placed in a straitjacket, and thrown in. They told me I was now an inmate of the asylum, that I’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and would spend the rest of my life there. The same night, they began dosing me with medications that made me incapable of speech, of coherent thought. I believe I did a great deal of drooling and moaning, something the orderlies found hysterically funny.

“In the days following, they began injecting me with various substances that caused pain – there seemed to be no other purpose for them. And then, when I had been in that state for slightly more than a year – I was twelve by then – the experiments began. They would strap me face-down on a cold metal table and without anesthesia, cut me open and jam syringes into my spine. I could feel things happening inside, but understood none of it.

"When they were done, they’d sew me up, put my pajama shirt back on – the same one, incidentally, I’d been wearing since the night my father died – and send me to the Common Room with the other inmates. That’s all we were at that point. Not patients, not residents. Prisoners. Inmates. They kept us medicated so we wouldn’t harm ourselves or each other, but I was able to think clearly enough to realize I had to stop taking the pills they dispensed throughout the day.

“I figured out how to do that after a while. It was ridiculously easy to pretend; all I had to do was mimic the behavior of the others, continue to act the way I remembered when I was drugged. Eventually, I eluded them temporarily, but no one seemed to care. So I’d wander the building, reacquainting myself with the way the floors were divided, where and what all the rooms were. They’d always catch me, though, and then I’d be subjected to those injections that were designed to torture the recipient. It felt like flames rushing through every vein. Once in a while they’d give me something that made it feel like all my nerves had been exposed and were being scrubbed with sandpaper. I began looking for places to hide, but until I finally found a good spot many years later, they continued to experiment on me.

“Sometimes my wanderings would take me past their offices, which they rarely closed, and I would see them doing things to some of the men that no one should ever do. During this time, I also came across the ward where they kept most of the women. They were strapped down, and upon seeing me there, the more coherent among them begged me to set them free.

"One woman asked me to end her life. It wasn’t until I happened upon a chart someone had left hanging from the foot of one of the beds that I understood why. From what I could tell by the notes, she was part of an experiment aimed at finding ways to chemically terminate pregnancies. I must have been around fourteen at that point, and knew enough about the reproduction process to realize the doctors were purposely getting these women with child solely for the purpose of carrying out this ungodly experiment. How tempted I was to release them all, but of course, they would just be rounded up again, maybe even punished for getting away.

“Before I could do anything at all, I heard footsteps approaching the ward and found a hiding spot in one of the unused cabinets. Three doctors and two orderlies came in…I will not tell you what they did. It was horrible. I watched for only a couple of minutes, and then had to close my eyes and put my fingers in my ears. Being stuck in that cabinet for nearly three hours was bad, but when the men left and I was able to leave, I found a logbook in the desk of the floor nurse – who for some reason wasn’t there at the time – that recorded their activity, how many of the woman had gotten pregnant from their attentions, and how they reacted to the different medications.

"Many of them, I learned, had immediately begun to hemorrhage in the wake of the fetus dying, and would be left to bleed to death. They had no interest in saving their lives. So many other women were in residence there, or were being admitted constantly, keeping these victims alive was unnecessary. They kept a record of how many of them had survived this treatment, too. Those who did were kept for further experimentation until they died.

“Everyone subjected to experimentation was much older than I, of course. They died horribly and in alarming numbers. The orderlies would take their bodies and toss them into the furnaces in the south basement. I couldn’t say why I felt the need to keep following people and watching all these things happen, but perhaps it was my way of handling the bizarre life I had been forced to lead. Not knowing what was going on frightened me more, I think.

“One day I noticed that the doctors had begun to change; their hair was getting grey, their faces more lined. New doctors began to appear, but these, like the original group, engaged in the same horrendous practices. I was introduced to them as their most promising test subject for what they called their centerpiece project, the one that would define and justify all they’d been doing. How lucky I am, I remembered thinking – sarcastically, of course. If I thought I’d be treated any better by the incoming lot, I was badly mistaken. New medications, new experimental drugs, were being formulated all the time, and I had the privilege of being the lab animal on which to test the ones that pertained to my purpose, as well as a few that weren’t.

“My least favorite was Thorazine, and I was thrilled when it was taken off the list of viable drugs for treating mental disorders. I hated what it did to me. Adequately pretending I’d taken it when I didn’t was impossible. Somehow, they always knew with that one, and would force it down my throat to make sure I’d swallowed it.

“Many years passed like this, my only feeling of satisfaction coming from seeing the doctors age, retire, die, while I continued to be young and yes, weakened by all the drugs and testing, but stronger than they’d ever be.”

Max decided to end with that. The next terrible milestone in the story was the day he was told the consequences of his prolonged youth, and he wasn’t ready to inform Anna about that yet. “I’m tired now.” He got up, leaned down and kissed her gently on the mouth, and headed back to The Pavilion, not waiting for her to join him. Tonight, she’d said. Well, he’d find out what she meant by that, he supposed. Right now, though, he desperately needed a hot shower.

A pity they didn’t have lye soap any more. His need to scrub off the filth that spawned his narrative was intense, and he didn’t think that the perfume-infused bar they used these days would be adequate.

VI

Elyse read the letter again, hardly able to believe her good fortune. It told her that the tissue samples she’d requested would be coming by separate post, and should be arriving within the week. All that remained now was to obtain a sample directly from Max.

She’d been listening to the recordings of his story, and until it became obvious that he and Anna had begun engaging in far more than talk, she’d been very pleased with what she’d been hearing. But then Anna had begged Max to make love to her, and the sounds that followed, well, she’d had to erase them, of course. Worse than playing a porno flick with the picture off, the vocalizations of their pleasure were at the same time teasing her libido and embarrassing her sense of ethics. Delete, delete, well, listen once more…delete.

After that first discovery of their heated trysts, she’d confronted the girl, telling her how dangerous her behavior could be to Max’s mental state. Anna had laughed in her face.

“Your mental state, you mean. When’s the last time you got laid, Dr. Franco?”

Refusing to get drawn into a defensive stance and ignoring the rudeness, Elyse had merely shaken her head and told the young lady to be careful. Max may appear stable, but whether or not his story was legitimate, its implications defined a psyche that had to be fragile at best. “Besides, I can’t stop you, but I also don’t need to listen to it.”

Anna had only grinned, plucked the recorder away from her, and flounced out.

“Great.” Elyse felt helpless – she needed to hear that story, to hear the way he told it, the terms he used, the ease with which he used them. All of it meant something. All of it would mean even more should there be a DNA match.

By the time Anna came by with the next set of recordings, the samples would have arrived. Was she happy that Max was able to have what seemed like a good relationship with someone? Of course she was. But what if the tests proved him to be as old as he said he was? What would that mean? How long was he supposed to live? Ah, too many questions for now.

She picked up the phone and called The Pavilion to request that one of the physicians obtain a tissue sample from Mr. Colson.

Who, if he was telling the truth, had just brought “robbing the cradle” to new and epic heights.

She refused to tell him how she was doing it. Said if he didn’t know, he couldn’t tell anyone, and she’d have a better chance of continuing to get away with it. He accepted her premise with good grace, openly delighted that she was there at all. In his room. In his bed. Every night now for nearly a week. They fulfilled their need for what was so freely and mutually given.

Max had never dreamed he’d have this kind of relationship – any kind of relationship – with someone who wasn’t manic, or dirty, or likely to murder him for no explainable reason. He had therefore avoided all liaisons, despite the availability to indulge, despite the encouragement of the filthy-minded doctors who wanted to watch him “perform” with one or more of the other inmates, male or female. He refused by disappearing. Over the years he’d become extraordinarily adept at making himself scarce, at being in the right place at the right time to overhear plans they had for him and hiding before they could make him do something sickening.

Letting down his emotional walls a little, he admitted to Anna that she was his first, that before her, he’d never experienced this kind of contact.

“I took your virginity?” she asked, her grey-blue eyes luminous in moonshard light piercing the crooked fissure between unevenly closed drapes.

“No, Anna. I gave it.” A gentle correction, but an important one.

During the less magical daytime hours, he continued to share his story. He told her about the unexpected visit by officials from some government agency, one associated with public health, about how at first he feared these inspectors would be murdered by the doctors or held prisoner there so they couldn’t tell anyone what they had stumbled upon. But with them were men in dark blue jackets with the letters “FBI” in white across their backs, and these men carried guns. They looked more dangerous than the doctors, but not in the same way. The hospital was evacuated almost immediately. Everyone – patients, nurses, orderlies, doctors – were brought outside. Except P-710. He had retreated further into the building, making his way to a private spot no one could possibly know about.

One floor deeper into the ground below the North basement labs was the Locker. The word on its door was “Morgue,” but they never called it that. The Locker held no whole corpses awaiting burial. No one got buried. Burned to ash, but never buried. Rather, this room with its icy cold air, bare cement walls and floors, supply cabinets and built-in freezers, contained body parts. Organs. Chunks of human tissue from every part of their former owners. And behind this repository of gore was another room separated from the main one by a false wall.

During one of his many escapes, he had found a way to remove the back of one of the supply cabinets which he’d pulled away from the wall. Working steadily, often until his hands bled, he had chipped at the cement bricks with stolen surgical tools until he’d removed enough to make what would become an opening he could slip through. Behind the bricks had been a wall of dirt, but he dug into it, placing the muddy soil in his slippers and dumping it outside through one of the small vents that kept the air circulating on the first floor. It took years, but by the time the asylum was investigated and shut down, he’d been living in this secret chamber for nearly a decade.

Access was gained through the cabinet, its back acting as both wall and door. Inside this cozy ten-by-ten space he kept a supply of candles, matches, some thick blankets and a pillow he’d managed to sneak out of the room that had once been his father’s, a change of clothing, soap, a toothbrush and paste, and as many books as he could fit in what room was left.

Naturally, he had to let himself get caught once in a while so they wouldn’t look too diligently for him, but most of the time he avoided the doctors so completely, a few had even forgotten he was there. On the day the asylum was raided, he chose to stay, using a combination of ventilator shafts and connecting doors between rooms to get to the Locker.

From inside his hiding place, he eventually heard people going through everything on the other side, even opening the cabinet behind which he waited, barely breathing.

“Sounds like what happened to Ann Frank,” Anna said, awed.

“Who?”

“You know – that Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis.”

He frowned. “The…the what?”

She searched his face for a few seconds and shook her head. “Wow. You really don’t know.”

“Oh, Anna. There is a great deal I don’t know. We were never allowed access to any kind of media, no radios used except by the doctors. We existed outside of time and away from reality. Well, most people’s reality.”

“But you knew about televisions and computers, didn’t you?”

“The Chief of Staff had a television, and they put a large one in the lounge used by short-term residents. The rest of us were never allowed to go anywhere near there, but I’d found a way to access that part of the building without getting caught. I thought it was sorcery the first time I saw one.” He smiled at himself. “And computers – the ones we had were nothing like what you have now. I asked Dr. Franco about that device she always brings with her, and she told me was a kind of computer called a, er, a lap…”

“Laptop.”

“Thank you. She showed me a little of what it can do. And her phone. It’s all beyond me, I’m afraid.”

“Hmm. But so – then what? I mean, after they shut the asylum down. When did you come out of hiding?”

“I waited until I hadn’t heard anything for several days. Of course, I was almost starving by then and needed to use the bathroom rather badly, so I probably would have come back out in any event.

“What I found astonished me. Everything had been almost literally torn apart. The offices were the worst. Every drawer in the desks had been removed, thrown to the floor, their contents removed, pictures and things yanked from the walls, the frames broken and empty.

The parts of the computers that stored information had been carried off, too. The operating rooms were in chaos. It looked as if they’d purposely wrecked everything in them and maybe they did. They’d all been occupied, I’m certain, their tables and beds holding patients in some state of torture. Every bit of medication had been swept from the supply cabinets, but they left things like bandages, peroxide and witch hazel, probably because they weren’t dangerous.

“Generally, though, the place was a mess, hospital gowns, articles of clothing, bloody rags, personal belongings, all strewn about, many crushed underfoot by the men sent in to clear the place out. Some of the windows in the lab doors were broken, I think because the doctors had stupidly tried locking them to keep the inspectors out. I’m calling them ‘inspectors,’ but I’m not really sure who or what they were.

“I had emerged from my refuge in the morning, but once it got dark, I discovered that the building was no longer supplied with electricity. Fortunately, I’d learned how to work the generator on the second floor. It was for emergencies, and had a power supply the electric company knew nothing about. The janitor told me about it when I was about seven. He though it was a great joke on the utilities. I never knew why he felt that way. Perhaps he thought they asked too much for their service.” He stopped and nodded at something behind her.

A male nurse was approaching them. Anna glanced over her shoulder and then stood. “Everything okay?” she asked when he was close enough to hear.

“Yup. Just need Mr. C. for a sec. Gotta get a tissue sample.”

Max paled. In his experience, that meant another scar, pain. “No. You can’t do that.”

“Do what? What’s up, Max?” The nurse appeared genuinely baffled.

“What kind of sample do you want?” Nothing that had happened in this place thus far had indicated a sudden onset of atrocious behavior on the part of the staff. The terminology was the immediate problem, but not, he hoped, a precursor to the only reality of that term he had ever known.

“Uh, it’s a – here.” The man produced a sealed item which he unwrapped to reveal a cotton swab on a long wooden dowel. “Just open your mouth so I can swab the inside of your cheek.”

“What?”

“They do that all the time,” Anna said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “They aren’t going to hurt you or cut you up, you know.”

Uncertain, wondering if he should begin to feel foolish yet, he complied. The nurse wiped the cotton tip against the inner surface of his left cheek, then put the swab into a plastic container designed to keep it uncontam- inated.

“All done. Thanks.” With a last puzzled glance at Max, he left.

“What was that for?”

“No idea. Don’t worry about it; I’m sure they’ll tell you. Probably a health thing.”

Now he felt foolish. “I overreacted, I think.”

“Understandable. So you were saying how the hospital was left in a huge mess. Then what?” She resumed her seat.

“Then what…then nothing. I decided I was probably better off there than anywhere else. I must have been about ninety years old. The world had passed me by and I doubted I could cope with the changes. I also didn’t want to encounter worse than what I’d already seen and experienced. On the other hand, if people were nicer and hospitals were different, I might finding myself resenting my own decision to remain behind.

“The next thirty years were actually very peaceful, except for the two times when some young people broke in and vandalized the building. They must have thought they would find things worth stealing, and in the end, just broke and destroyed what time hadn’t yet been able to ruin. So that was it. I had that whole place to myself, and used the solitude to reconcile myself with everything that had happened there, to heal. Physically, there are things that will never be right because of what they did to me, but here – ” he tapped his temple with one finger, “ – here, things are much better.”

She stood up and stretched. “I heard something interesting today. I don’t know if they want you to know this or not, but I can’t see that it would be harmful.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The asylum. Seems the City has been fighting with the Weatheridge estate for years to get the place torn down. Good thing you aren’t there any more; the building and grounds were finally signed over to the city a few days ago, and they’ll be knocking it into rubble in a day or two.”

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Relieved, perhaps. Not upset. It had been his home, but it shouldn’t have been. Not under those conditions. Certainly not for that long. He was sorry to lose some of the books and a faded sepia photograph of his father that he’d found in the man’s bedroom when he’d scavenged through it for the blankets and an extra set of clothes. But had he really ever intended to return for those things? He thought not. The regret was too indistinct. Too long away by now.

He felt she was waiting for a reaction from him. He gave her a simple one. “Good.”

“Guess that’s it, then. The rest happened the day I saw you?”

“It did. It is.”

“Yeah.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you.”

“You didn’t have to listen. I believe my sense of gratitude may be greater than yours.”

“You talk funny.”

“I’m old.”

The smiles they flashed each other over that turned into laughter. Max felt good now when he laughed. There was no hurt in it.

*****

Dr. Franco’s eyes had been filled with something that widened them when she looked at Max. He caught glimmers, hints to suggest what it might be, but opted for patience to draw out the explanation. She said nothing for several moments after he greeted her, staring at him with that odd expression that couldn’t stop talking.

“Please sit, Max.”

Finally. The sound was almost a relief. He sat, taking his turn at silence.

Dr. Garner had loaned her his office without asking her why she needed it. Normally, her meetings with Max took place outside in good weather, in the visitor’s lounge otherwise.

She folded her hands on the borrowed desk and drew in a deep breath, giving herself traction perhaps. “I now know beyond any doubt that everything you’ve told me is true.”

That wasn’t what he’d expected her to say at all. Something about Anna and his relationship with her, yes. Not this. “How?”

“We have the capability of mapping genes, and can match a person’s DNA with samples either taken or given. For instance, if a man commits a crime and in the process gets injured, any skin or blood samples found containing his DNA can later be matched with a sample of his living cells to place him at the scene.”

“DNA?”

She smiled and took a pen from a cup of them next to the phone. “It stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. DNA.” She wrote this on a small pad sitting nearby, tore off the sheet and handed it across the desk.

He frowned, staring at the word. Why did it bother him so? “Nuclein… nucleotide units…” he murmured, feeling ill. The term was one he’d known since – ah. During one of the most painful series of experiments, between uncontrollable screams, he’d heard the doctors discussing the possible effect on his DNA of the excruciating chemical flowing through his body. It was going to alter the growth and structure of some of those units, they said, the ones that produced new cells and maintained old ones.

None of their efforts, discoveries or theories amazed him. Only the fact that he was somehow staying alive despite the unending agony that left his throat raw, his ribs sore, his body desperately craving a physical amnesia once the suicide-inciting sensations faded.

DNA. Anathema. “And what does this mean for me?”

“I obtained a sample of your DNA from the agency in Washington that’s been holding the evidence from Weatheridge, and compared it with the sample we took two days ago.”

Ah. The nurse with the alarming cotton swab. “And they matched?”

“They did. I won’t apologize for doubting you, but I will say that I’m in awe of your existence.” She smiled for the first time since he’d come in. “You’re a wonder, Max. Unique in all the world. I have to wonder if this youthful state is permanent, though. I requested a copy of the notes left behind that related to you as P-710 hoping to find out more. This could be a major breakthrough in anti-aging research. I’m just sorry it was at your expense.”

He shook his head. “It’s not permanent. That’s what they told me unless, as was their tendency, they lied.” He looked away. “On this subject, however, I don’t think they did.”

“Meaning that at some point, you’ll finally begin to age?”

“Meaning that at any time I could suddenly reacquire all the years kept at bay until that point, and my body will rapidly fall into decrepitude. Death will occur almost immediately once it begins.” A matter of fact. No regret.

“Does this bother you?”

“Not at all. I’ve already lived far too long, and without the benefit of senility to lessen the intensity of my extended time here. I suppose I could have done away with myself before now, but like I told Anna, I’m a stubborn idiot. Not even the ghosts of those doctors deserve that satisfaction.”

She nodded, uncomfortable, he could tell, with his calm pragmatism. And then some other thought made her sit back, biting her lower lip.

“Is there more?” Now, perhaps, that other thing - ?

“Well, you and Anna - ”

Ah, yes. That other thing. “The recordings?”

“Yes. I was captivated by your narrative, the story of your highly implausible life, but then I had to hear, well, you know what I’m talking about, yes?”

He allowed himself a grin, one free of embarrassment. “Yes. It was…a ‘first’ for me, by the way.”

“Really!”

“Of course. Sex with the insane is a dangerous endeavor, unless you’re a doctor who has the help of drugs, restraints and other doctors to keep yourself from physical harm.” His grin had morphed into something almost ugly. “I stayed away from that.”

She allowed herself a brief laugh. “I guess that gives you the longest period of celibacy on record!”

“Hmm. I guess it does. Was there anything else?”

“No. May I tell others about this?”

“Not if it means they’ll want to start more experiments on me. I will destroy myself if that happens.” The calm voice belied the darkening of his eyes. His ghost was hissing again, this time at Dr. Franco.

“Of course not, Max. I meant Dr. Garner, mainly. He needs to know you aren’t mad.”

He stood up, needing to see Anna, to eat lunch, to do anything but continue this. “I never was sure about that, you know. Good day, Dr. Franco. Thank you for doing your research – and I am glad you believe me now.”

She said nothing as he left, unsure, it seemed, how to respond.

*****

Anna had returned the recorder to Dr. Franco earlier that evening. Her reward was being told the truth about Max. This was the first thing she brought up when he went to his room for the night. As usual, she was sitting on the side of his bed, waiting with the light off.

“What did she say?” he asked, removing his shoes. “How much did she tell you?”

“She told me everything you said was true, that they have DNA proof that you’re the same Maxwell Colson who moved into the asylum with his father in 1906, the same one who was committed there with schizo- phrenia in 1911 and given the designation P-710.” She stood up and went to him, looking up into his eyes with pain in her own. “She also told me that you would start to die one day, and when you did, it would be over very quickly.”

He nodded, never intending to deny it, always intending to tell her. “I’m sorry.”

“For what? Living so long? Being so beautiful? Making me so happy?” She undid his shirt and kissed his strongly muscled chest. “Oh, Max.”

Later, after they’d exhausted themselves with each other, he stroked her hair absently as she lay curled against him. “What do you do, Anna? How do you always have the time to be here?” So far, no personal questions, no personal surrender. It had been thus with her of necessity, but he had a feeling necessity would soon be altering its course.

“I’m a student. My classes are early in the morning, and since I live on campus, I can do what I like with my nights.”

“Where is the school?”

“About six blocks away.”

His habit of rooting himself to one place had prevented exploration of the areas surrounding the hospital. “That close?”

“Yup. My family lives in another state. We don’t really get along, so when I told them I wanted to continue taking classes through the summer, they didn’t object.”

He knew so little about families. His own had been together only briefly, although he imagined it had been a happy one, based on his memories. It saddened him that hers was not. He leaned over and kissed her forehead.

“It’s okay, Max. I’m happy enough.”

That spark of instinctive comprehension that enabled her to understand him so very well flared outward with these words and ignited something he’d been trying to keep safely away from emotional fires. He stared at her in the semi-darkness, the blue shades of night turning her features into art on a living canvas. Unable to tear his gaze away, he fought what was rising in his chest, failed, and the tidal wave broke, spilling out through his eyes.

“What is it? Why are you crying?” She raised a hand to brush at the tears with gentle fingers.

“No.” He took her hand, moving it away, and kissed her deeply. There was nothing else for it. She responded and they made love once more, but this time his actions were urgent, almost violent, his mouth never leaving hers until they both had to cry out as the crest of their passion broke simultaneously. As deep echoes in a vast canyon, they recovered in a slow, lingering fade to normal.

Then she looked at him in wonder, at last able to speak. “What – what was that, Max? What just happened?”

Should he tell her? Could he? He answered her with his eyes only. They said, “I fell in love with you, Anna.” Then went silent so his voice could say, “I – I’m not sure.”

He could never tell her, not now. She didn’t need to feel the ache of their inevitable separation any more deeply. Yes, it would hurt her, but not nearly as much as it would if she knew how he felt. Once he admitted to love, she might admit to the same. From that would come the heavier pain, the sorrow he wished to spare her.

Typical of her nature, he was certain, she let it go. “All right. Let’s get some sleep.” She kissed his hand and curled into him once more, pulling up the blanket against the air-conditioner’s arbitrary atmosphere.

VII

“I don’t…my God, Elyse, is this what I think it is?” Dr. Garner looked up from the sheaf of papers before him on the desk. He’d skimmed through them the first time, time needed for his credulity centers to catch up with his eyes. The second time took much longer. “Is this incontrovertible proof that Max really isn’t…no. How is such a thing possible?”

“Oh, come on. You know damn well it’s possible.”

“No, not the science – the timing. How could they have accomplished this so long ago? And so effectively that he’s still alive and – and youthful? I’m practically speechless!”

“Apparently not.” Her tone was dry but not accusatory. “Look, I felt the same way when I got the results. I even asked the lab to run the test again to be sure.”

“They had no idea what it was for, did they?”

“Of course not. Oh, no, Will, don’t even think about it!” She hadn’t missed a sudden calculating look in his eyes. “Max has been through enough!”

Thrusting out his jaw, Garner weighed her words. “Yeah.” He reluctantly acquiesced to her compassion. “I guess he has. Enough for about two lifetimes, give or take a decade.”

“Must have felt like more.”

“I wonder if he ever loved anyone or had any relationships over the years.”

“You never asked him during your therapy sessions?” She was surprised.

“We haven’t gotten that far yet.” He gave her a questioning shrug. “It’d be good for him, though, don’t you think?”

Her glance slid sideways. She shrugged back not answering.

The clock on his desk ticked once, twice…”Elyse, don’t tell me!”

“For God’s sake, Will, what are you thinking! I wouldn’t do that and you damn well know it. No, it’s Anna.”

He sat back, seeming to be shocked at first, but then started to chuckle. “Good for him. Her, too. She’s a really nice kid.”

“And he’s over a hundred years old.” But for some reason, this fact turned unexpectedly amusing, where before it had been a concern. She found herself laughing, Garner’s chuckles expanding to join her level of hilarity.

“Incredible,” said Will when he could talk again. He wiped at his eyes. “I just hope they’re using protection.”

“Well, she might, but I’m not sure he even knows about that.”

Will blew out a long breath. “So now what? He isn’t suffering from any kind of mental illness. Should we release him?”

“Release…where would he go? All he knows is here and the asylum – and that’s about to get demolished by the City.”

“Yeah, I heard. Does he know?”

She wasn’t sure and said so. “Don’t make him leave,” she added. “I don’t think he’d survive.”

Despite all they’d learned about the things Max had endured, neither of them could see him making a new life in this century. They didn’t have to voice their agreement, a nod sufficed from each, settling the matter. Max would stay at The Pavilion until he either asked to move out, or died. No one could ever make up for all he’d suffered and lost, but at least they could give him a safe, permanent home.

How far back does one go to determine the original occurrence that never should have happened, but which set in motion the string of inevitability culminating in a mountain of irony? Which was the greatest mistake? A foolish question, since life never follows only one path, but every action, motion, mistake, causes an outward-moving impact, making it impossible to discover what took a person from birth to death via the particular path that described the entirety of his life.

Looking in the mirror, Max pondered these things. He’d been about to comb his hair when he noticed the grey. A couple of strands, no more, but there they were. He’d stopped breathing for a few seconds, allowing certainty to catch up with him and bringing with it a declaration of all the ironic circumstances that were probably responsible for the timing of this change.

He had no answer. Plenty of conjectures, but would that help? He decided to settle on the only one he could accept despite it and all of the other possibilities being nothing less than cruel. He chose, then, to believe that the chemicals causing him to stay young had continued to do their job as long as he remained free of the strongest emotions. Over the years he’d experienced deep anger, yes, intense hatred, even a powerful despair that had almost stopped his heart. But never before had he experienced love. Not this kind of love. His brain had never had a reason to release whatever natural chemical, hormone, that precipitated the event labeled “falling in love.” And he now believed that this biological element, being suddenly introduced, had somehow broken down the artificial anti-aging compound. The irony was truly sickening.

He straightened, aware of a sudden ache in one shoulder. That was new, too. Anna had been gone since before sunrise. At least he didn’t have to deal with telling her what was happening. Not face-to-face. He went to his desk and took out the notepad someone had put in the drawer, realized he had nothing with which to write, and went across the hall.

A woman answered his knock, his across-the-corridor neighbor, Mrs. Fallon. He asked her nicely for a pencil or pen, and after treating him to her strong opinion about how young people these days have forgotten the elegant art of letter-writing, brought him a blue ball-point pen. She made sure he knew she wanted it back when he was done before wishing him a nice day and closing the door.

While he still could, he wrote a letter to Anna. He told her that the aging had started, and leaving out the specifics, what he was going to do about it. He said he didn’t want her to see what was about to happen to his body because he wanted her to remember him as she’d known him. He said nothing about loving her, nothing about how that love had been his undoing. And he asked her to thank everyone for him for making his last days such good ones. Time to write to them separately was simply not going to be granted, he knew, especially not if he was going to do what was necessary to carry out his final plan.

He finished the letter, folded it, and placed it on his pillow where she’d find it that night. Then changed into the most comfortable outfit he had and went downstairs. At the front desk, the receptionist greeted him with cheer in her smile.

“Is there any way to find out when they’re going to tear down the old asylum?”

“You mean Weatheridge? Sure. Hang on.” She turned to her computer and began tapping the keys with the rapidity of long practice. He was impressed. “Here – oh! This afternoon, in fact!”

“Ah. Thank you. Listen, I need to see Anna – the girl who visits me all the time?”

She gave him a knowing grin. “I sure do. How can I help?”

“Call me a – a cab so I can get to the University. I’d walk, but I’m not sure how to get there.” He hated lying. So many lies had been tossed maliciously at him throughout the years. But this wasn’t malicious. Only necessary.

“No problem. I’ll take care of it – you go wait out by the front doors. Have fun!”

“Thank you.” I hope your life turns out well. His silent good wish made, he cast a final glance around the part of The Pavilion within vision range, and left. By the time he was through the doors, his knees had begun to feel like they were solidifying.

“Money…damn.” He remembered now that if he were to take a taxi, he’d need to pay for it. A quick search of his pockets yielded eight dollars, two more in change. It had to be enough. Thank goodness Dr. Garner had given him a kind of allowance with which to purchase personal items for himself in the hospital store – soap, razors, shaving cream, things like that. He rarely spent it. Now he would spend what remained.

Ten minutes passed before the cab pulled up. In that time, Max’s hair had gone almost completely grey; he saw it in the vehicle’s window and realized he probably had less time than he’d originally thought. Once in the back seat, he closed his eyes, feeling himself shutting down by degrees. The skin of his face felt different, his hands were developing brown spots. He wondered if he’d be able to get out of the cab once they got to the asylum grounds.

“Nine-fifty,” said the driver, pulling up by the north gate. He’d had to go around a gigantic vehicle with a large, heavy crane on its front from which dangled a massive iron ball. Trucks and other vehicles associated with demolition had been parked along the street, one of which had chains coming from it that were being attached to the wrought-iron fencing.

Max paid him, ignoring the man’s look of surprise. He’d picked up a much younger passenger but was being paid by a man so old he could barely get the money out of his back pocket. “Thank you.” Max managed a smile, hoping none of his teeth would fall out.

He spared only a brief glance upward at the crumbling building as he made his way as quickly as he could to the entrance leading into the kitchens. None of the workers were on that side yet. No one stopped him. Once inside, it took almost more effort than he had left to make it upstairs to his father’s suite. On the way, he had to traverse the second floor corridor where the generator sat silent now. He started to pass the door with its one-way mirror, but paused.

Ah, there are those changes I’ve been waiting for! He gave his reflection a wink. About time, he wanted to say, but couldn’t.

He reached the next set of stairs that were navigable and pulled himself upward, using the bannister, sometimes his knees to propel him toward his goal. When at last he reached the third floor landing, the pain in his joints almost kept him from continuing. But he was used to pain, wasn’t he. And this would be the last time he’d ever have to deal with it, so he fought back and finally made it to the door that had once meant peace.

He was ready to die. Had been ready for quite a while, in fact. But Anna had happened, giving him miles he would never have traded for destination. And then Anna had inflamed his heart, giving him what he needed to find rest at last. Had she known what falling in love with her had done to him, she might have hated herself, seen herself as his murderer. But he saw it as her final and greatest gift. There was no way to explain that, really, so he hadn’t tried.

He went to the dusty bed and fell more than sat on the bare mattress. What a life he’d had! What a crazy, mad life. Unable to remain upright, he lay down, rolling onto his back, and stared at the cracked, stained ceiling. As the last thing he’d ever see it wasn’t much, but in a perverse way it reminded him of everything he was.

The light seemed to be fading now. Outside, he could hear shouts, the grinding roar of a diesel engine awakening, the squeal of something huge moving, then coming closer. He said “goodbye” in a whisper like tissue going up in a brief flame, and closed his eyes for the last time, missing the only act of violence that wasn’t meant to cause torment.

The wrecking ball slammed into the third-floor wall, collapsing the upper floors and effectively providing Max’s body, already little more than a pattern of dust, with the only resting place for him that made sense.

EPILOGUE

Nature cares nothing for the pathos of mankind. It simply carries on, doing what it has always done. Growing, changing, running through its cycles so life of every kind can continue.

People build structures and they tear them down, but the grass grows wherever it will, heedless. The old asylum has been gone for almost three years, leveled, all traces covered by flower beds, broad pools of grass and brick walkways. Benches are tastefully placed along the latter, only a large bronze sign indicating that anything else had ever been here.

Not the most popular park in the city, it does get it share of joggers, walkers. Curiosity-seekers are always disappointed by how little information is offered on the etched metal plaque: “Former Location of The Weatheridge Asylum.” Under this are a few words about when it opened, when it was evacuated and condemned, and when it was demolished to make room for Colson Park.

No one knows where that name came from. Most assume it’s the name of the designer of the park’s layout, or perhaps the landscaping company hired to beautify the space. No one understands its significance, except one. One whose heart still aches for its namesake but understands and accepts what happened.

She stares at the glow of daylight that drips from surrounding trees and illuminates flower petals and grass blades. The minor turmoil this place stirs within her is stilled by the tug on her hand of a smaller one. She looks down to her right to find huge blue-green eyes staring up at her, the expression on his sweet two-year-old features one of mild impatience.

“Mommy, can we go?”

She pulls him into a swift hug that elicits something from him that sounds like “ugh!” and releases him. Her sigh is not happy, not sad. It’s a passing breeze that ruffles the top of the boy’s hair.

“Yes, Max. We can go now.”

Impressum

Texte: Judith A. Colella
Bildmaterialien: Cover by Laszlo Kugler
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 17.02.2013

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