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

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