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

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