At Marguerite, he waited for the WALK sign while his chest pumped and his legs jittered with the effort of standing. When he stepped off the curb, his knees buckled, spilling him into the crosswalk, the bike toppling on top of him. Music blasted from a café on the corner. Two young men helped him up, looked at him strangely, and told him to take it easy. A black Porsche screamed off Coast Highway and flew past, its blond driver screaming with the radio, her hair trailing back like a white-hot flame. So many lights, he thought. So much noise. The helmet helps hide me. Cross the street, Joseph — you are not a child — put one foot in front of the other...
Across finally, climbing carefully onto the curb, he leaned forward into the long, gentle uphill road that would lead him to Ann, to The Meeting. Ann would be there, but would he show? Did the letter get through, did it convince him? He put the thought from his mind. He was too tired to believe that anything more could go wrong. He checked his watch: early.
Joseph stood at the foot of Ann’s grave, just a rectangle of earth still darker than the ground around it. Why was there no headstone? He listened for her, and in his mind he talked to her, trying to offer comforts that, even though he meant them from his heart, still sounded inadequate and thin. It was hard to believe that only a few feet of earth now separated them, after he had worked so hard, come so far, come so close. It was good to feel this close. It was like a small drop of contentment added to an ocean of confusion, and a small drop was better than none at all.
He climbed back up the walkway to the big marble mausoleum, sat down, and rested his back against the cold wall. He turned and looked around the corner at the path down which he would come, if he came, a few minutes from now, according to the letter. His chest ached; his hands were swollen and filled with pain. The bicycle rested in the grass beside him, one wheel turning slowly in the cool May breeze, the helmet resting on the spokes of the other.
He closed his eyes and listened to the chatter of the dead. There is still time to leave all this, he thought. Enough money for a bus to somewhere. Emmett and Edith might help him flee — or would they? No. This is the path I’ve chosen.
As his heart began to still, Joseph pried into his pack and took out the tattered National Geographic of January 1987. It opened automatically to his picture. There he was — his brain, rather — displayed in the eerie neon colors of positron emission tomography. He looked down at the picture again for... what, he wondered, the millionth time in his life? His mind, as displayed, was a swirl of yellows and green, with the offending thalamus burning red-hot against a background of white. That is it, he thought, the source of schizophrenia, the key to me. He read the cutline again, although he had long since memorized it.
Peephole on mental illness (above) is offered by this positron emission tomography (PET) brain image of a violent schizophrenic. An overactive thalamus (red — right of center) is compensated by a correspondingly active frontal lobe in healthy people. This young man’s frontal lobe, as graphed by the PET scan, shows what scientists are finding with increasing frequency in the mentally ill — suppressed activity. The lobe (top — dark blue) shows little metabolic life. Scientists are now wrestling with the question of whether the suppressed frontal brain and overactive thalamus are genetically developed. Early findings of Dr. Winston Field at University of California, Irvine (top right), suggest that schizophrenia may have viral causes that can be traced back as far as the second trimester of fetal development. Two percent of Americans suffer from schizophrenia.
Joseph looked at the picture for a long time, focusing on his agitated thalamus, trying to imagine in his real brain a calming, a deceleration of all that... speed. That is what it felt like in there: something going faster than it should, slipping and burning while one part careened out of control, like a tire flung from a race car as the rest of it choked in the smoke caused by the fire.
This is the reason, he thought. This is the reason I am what I am. I am not cruel. I am not hateful. I simply am wired wrong. I am defective in production.
He folded the magazine shut and slid it back into his pack. He felt better. But even with this picture of his trouble, Joseph could never find absolute rest. There was always a part of him that was afraid of the other part. What scared him most wasn’t the strange faraway feeling that sometimes gripped him and seemed literally to pull him a few steps back from reality. He, with the help of the Navane and later the Clozaril, could control that slide away from the actual. What scared him was that at some point he became unaware of himself, and could not for the life of him explain where he was, what he was doing, or how he might have gotten there. One of the first times it had happened was with Lucy Galen in Hardin County. He could remember the story he had told her about the swamp — the money he’d found in the suitcase. He could remember her driving them out there, and he could remember the odd fact of having taken along a knife. But after that, there was no clarity, no remembrance, no hint. He recalled nothing of their walk to the swamp, nothing of ever pulling the knife, certainly nothing of stabbing her repeatedly as Lucy had testified that he had. Nothing of rape, no... nothing of ever having touched Lucy Galen.
Nothing of having ever touched Ann Cruz.
No, he thought, I did not do that. I did not do that. I did not...
Joseph looked out over the graveyard toward the fog-hidden Pacific. He spun the tire on the ten-speed, checked his watch: one minute to go. He lay his hands palms up on his lap and felt the burning pain.
Joseph stared at Ann’s grave. How stupid, he thought. How stupid and young and wrong I was — none of it, none of it, none of it should ever have happened. It had all begun to change just two years after Lucy, in the Lima State Hospital, with Dr. Nancy Hayes. Slowly, she had unraveled him, then put him back together. Slowly, the pieces began to fit. Slowly, he reconstituted himself, one sharp, angular, painful shard at a time, until the vessel was complete again, or at least as finished as it was ever going to be. It was Dr. Hayes who had taken him to Dr. Field, who had seen his problem for the first time, and given him, finally, the right drugs. Strange to think back now, thought Joseph, and understand that it all begins with knowing who you are. You know nothing in life — even with a color picture of your own brain — until you know who you are, and where you came from. Everything that is good follows from that.
Joseph heard the engine growing louder as a car wound up the cemetery road, came into the parking lot, circled around to the chapel. It was a muscular, throaty engine that shut down without a ping or a rattle. A door opened and shut. There were no footsteps for a moment, then the dry tap of shoes on concrete.
He has come, thought Joseph.
He leaned back against the cold marble of the crypt, drew up his knees, and held them close. The footsteps crunched down the gravel walkway behind him, each one louder, each one more filled with the specific sound of parting rocks. The smallest breeze issued past Joseph as the man moved past him, toward Ann. From the back, he looked tall, wide-shouldered but slender. He wore an overcoat. Both hands were lost in the side pockets — would he bring a gun? Him. The man continued on to Ann’s grave, stopping where Joseph had stopped, at the foot, looking down now, hands still deep in the pockets of his overcoat. He stood there a long while, looked once to his left, once to his right, once behind him up the path that he had taken.