Sanity by Judy Colella (beginner reading books for adults .TXT) 📕

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.