get him help.'
No one contradicted her.
'He always fascinated me,' she explained, 'because he was so wrapped up in himself, apparently independent of input from other people yet so obviously unhappy at the core. The few times I tried to talk to him he rebuffed me, really rudely. At first I was hurt, but then I wanted to understand him. So I went searching in the abnormal pysch books for something that fitted his behavioural patterns. Schizoid personality seemed to be perfect. Schizoids are incapable of establishing relationships, but it doesn't bother them. They're human islands. The early psychoanalysts considered them preschizophrenic, and though later research showed that most of them don't become psychotic, they're still considered vulnerable.' She stopped, embarrassed. 'You don't need to hear this from me.'
'Please go on.'
Hesitation.
'Really, Jen.'
'Okay. Anyway, I found myself observing him, searching for signs of psychosis but not really expecting to find them. So when he actually began to exhibit symptoms, it shocked me.'
'When was this?'
'Several months before Dr. Flowers asked him to leave. There was a period before then when he seemed more withdrawn than usual - which I've since learned can be a psychopsychotic pattern - but the first time I actually saw him do anything overtly bizarre was around three or four months before he left. On a Tuesday. I'm sure of that
because Tuesday was my free day and I was studying in the reading room. It was late afternoon, and I was the only one there. He came in, went to a corner, faced the wall, and started muttering to himself. Then the muttering grew louder, and I could tell he was being paranoid, carrying on an argument with someone who wasn't there.'
'Do you remember what he said?'
'He was upset at this imaginary person, accusing him -or her - of trying to hurt him, of spreading bloody plumes. At first I thought he'd said 'fumes' but then he used the word again several times. Plumes. He repeated the word stink a lot, too, used it as a noun: The imaginary person was full of stink; the earth was full of stink. It was fascinating, and I wanted to stay and listen; but he scared me, so I got out of there. He didn't acknowledge my leaving. I don't think he'd been aware of my presence in the first place.'
'Was there anything in the hallucinations about zombies or glass canyons?'
She drummed her fingers on her knees and grew pensive. 'Glass canyons' sounds familiar.' She thought awhile longer. 'Yes, definitely. I remember thinking, then, that it sounded more like poetry than a hallucination. Almost pristine. Which is probably why it didn't register at first. How did you know that, Alex?'
'He called me the night he escaped. He was hallucinating and using phrases identical to the ones you just mentioned. One of the things he talked about was a glass canyon that he needed to escape. The other day I visited him in jail and he said 'glass' several times.'
'How did he look?' asked Josh.
'Not good,' I said.
'So it sounds,' said Jennifer, 'as if there's some consistency to the hallucinatory content.'
'Some.'
'Couldn't that indicate that the hallucinations had something to do with a major crisis or conflict?'
Not according to Guy Mainwaring, M.D.
'It's possible,' I said. 'Do any of you know about some event in his life that would relate to plumes or stink?'
Nothing.
'What about zombies or glass canyons?'
They shook their heads.
'I did see him talking to himself,' said Felicia, 'but I never got close enough to hear what he was saying. He frightened me, so whenever I saw him coming, I left immediately. One time I did notice that he was crying.' She hugged herself and stared at her lap.
'Did either of you mention any of this to Dr. Flowers?' I asked.
'Not right away,' said Jennifer. 'That's what bothers me; I should have. But when I saw him two days later, he seemed more normal. He even said hello. So I thought it might have been a one-time thing, maybe a drug reaction. But a few days later he was doing it again - hallucinating and getting agitated. At that point I went straight to Sarita's office, but she was out of town. I didn't know who to call - I didn't want to get him in trouble - so I waited until after the weekend and told her. She thanked me and said she was aware he was having problems and I should stay away from him. I wanted to discuss it with her, but she dismissed me, which seemed pretty cold at the time. Later I realised it was because of confidentiality.'
'I was going to tell her, but I didn't,' said Josh. 'Several times. I knew something was wrong, and I realise now that I should have said something, but he was already in trouble for not registering for classes, and I thought it might make matters worse for him.' He paused and broke eye contact. 'I know in retrospect it sounds like a plus four cop-out, but that was my reasoning at the time.'
'My turn,' said David. 'I never saw a damned thing, he always gave me the creeps. Viscerally. So I went out of my way to avoid him. The first thing I noticed was when he freaked out in group.'
'That was horrible,' said Jennifer, and the others nodded in agreement. 'The way he screamed and got all flushed, the look in his eyes. We shouldn't have let it get that far.'
The atmosphere in the room turned gloomy. I chose my words carefully, knowing a successful approach would have to appeal to their intellects as well as their emotions.
'Virtually everyone I've spoken to about this case is consumed with guilt,' I said, 'without justification. A human being deteriorated, and no one knows why. From a scientific point of view, psychosis is still a giant, tragic black hole and nothing makes people feel more helpless than an unsolved tragedy. We all want to feel in control of our destinies, and when events occur that rob us of that feeling of control, we seek answers, search for meaning - punishing ourselves with I-should-haves and I-could-haves. The fact is, nothing you did or didn't do caused Jamey to go crazy. Nor did it matter if you told Dr. Flowers or not because schizophrenia doesn't work that way.' And I repeated the reassurance I'd given Heather Cadmus the day before.
They listened and digested, four superb data-processing systems.
'Okay,' said David. 'That makes sense.'
'I understand what you're saying, but 1 don't feel any better,' said Felicia. 'I suppose it will take a while to integrate the information emotionally.'
'Can we go on to something else?' asked Jennifer, inspecting her nails.
No one disagreed, so I said sure.
'This has been on my mind for a while,' she said. 'After he was arrested, I went into the library and read everything I could on serial killers. It's a surprisingly thin literature, but everything I found indicated that those types of murder are carried out by sadistic sociopaths, not schizophrenics. I know some authorities believe sociopaths are really thinly veiled psychotics - Cleckley wrote that they wore a mask of sanity - but they don't usually decompensate and turn psychotic, do they?'
'Not usually.'
'So it doesn't make sense, does it?'
'Maybe he committed the murders before he decompensated,' suggested Josh.
'No way,' she said. 'The killings started about half a year after he left the project, and he was pretty far gone by
then. And the last two occurred after he escaped from the mental hospital. Unless, of course, he had some kind of remission.' She turned to me for an answer.
'He did present a pattern of relapse and remission,' I said. 'You described some of that: acting paranoid and disoriented one day and being able to say hello two days later. But your point about psychopaths rarely, if ever, turning into psychotics is a good one. I never observed anything sadistic or psychopathic in his nature, nor has anyone I've spoken to so far. Have any of you?'
'No,' said Josh. 'He was antisocial and rude, but there was nothing cruel about him. If anything, his conscience was overdeveloped.'
