“Sure,” Chuck said eventually, his face still flushed.
The dock appeared as if by trick of light, stretching out from the sand, a stick of chewing gum from this distance, insubstantial and gray.
Teddy felt dehydrated from his time at the toilet and maybe a bit exhausted from the last couple of minutes; no matter how much he’d learned to carry it, carry her, the weight could wear him down every now and then. A dull ache settled into the left side of his head, just behind his eye, as if the flat side of an old spoon were pressed there. It was too early to tell if it were merely a minor side effect of the dehydration, the beginnings of a common headache, or the first hint of something worse—the migraines that had plagued him since adolescence and that at various times could come so strongly they could temporarily rob him of vision in one eye, turn light into a hailstorm of hot nails, and had once-only once, thank God—left him partially paralyzed for a day and a half. Migraines, his anyway, never visited during times of pressure or work, only afterward, when all had quieted down, after the shells stopped dropping, after the pursuit was ended. Then, at base camp or barracks or, since the war, in motel rooms or driving home along country highways—they came to do their worst. The trick, Teddy had long since learned, was to stay busy and stay focused. They couldn’t catch you if you didn’t stop running.
He said to Chuck, “Heard much about this place?”
“A mental hospital, that’s about all I know.”
“For the criminally insane,” Teddy said.
“Well, we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t,” Chuck said.
Teddy caught him smiling that dry grin again. “You never know, Chuck. You don’t look a hundred percent stable to me.” “Maybe I’ll put a deposit down on a bed while we’re here, for the future, make sure they hold a place for me.”
“Not a bad idea,” Teddy said as the engines cut out for a moment, and the bow swung starboard as they turned with the current and the engines kicked in again and Teddy and Chuck were soon facing the open sea as the ferry backed toward the dock.
“Far as I know,” Teddy said, “they specialize in radical approaches.”
“Red?” Chuck said.
“Not Red,” Teddy said. “Just radical. There’s a difference.”
“You wouldn’t know it lately.”
“Sometimes, you wouldn’t,” Teddy agreed.
“And this woman who escaped?”
Teddy said, “Don’t know much about that. She slipped out last night. I got her name in my notebook. I figure they’ll tell us everything else.”
Chuck looked around at the water. “Where’s she going to go? She’s going to swim home?”
Teddy shrugged. “The patients here, apparently, suffer a variety of delusions.”
“Schizophrenics?”
“I guess, yeah. You won’t find your everyday mongoloids in here in any case. Or some guy who’s afraid of sidewalk cracks, sleeps too much. Far as I could tell from the file, everyone here is, you know, really crazy.” Chuck said, “How many you think are faking it, though? I’ve always wondered that. You remember all the Section Eights you met in the war? How many, really, did you think were nuts?”
“I served with a guy in the Ardennes—“
“You were there?”
Teddy nodded. “This guy, he woke up one day speaking backward.”
“The words or the sentences?”
“Sentences,” Teddy said. “He’d say, ‘Sarge, today here blood much too is there.’ By late afternoon, we found him in a foxhole, hitting his own head with a rock. Just hitting it. Over and over. We were s6rattled that it took us a minute to realize he’d scratched out his own eyes.”
Dolores, who’d enjoyed sunbathing, probably would have loved this place, but Teddy could feel only the constant sweep of the ocean breeze, a warning from the sea that it could pounce at will, suck’you down to its/:]oor.
The orderlies came back down the dock with the mail and fhe medical cases and loaded them onto handcarts, and McPherson signed for the items on a clipboard and handed the clipboard back to one of the ferry guards and the guard said, “We’ll be taking off, then.” McPherson blinked in the sun.
“The storm,” the guard said. “No one seems to know what it’s going to do.”
McPherson nodded.
“We’ll contact the station when we need a pickup,” Teddy said.