We’d been in open country for a while now, driving past fields where black cows were grazing. From a distance, the hospital looked like a big birthday cake topped with cream and plumped down on a tablecloth that’s too brightly colored. The ice had started melting on the side. As we approached, the cake got bigger, the high walls surrounding it too. There were coils of barbed wire all the way along the perimeter wall. I didn’t see any watchtowers, but the whole place looked like one hell of a prison. Two male nurses, who must have thought they were big men before they saw me, came and fetched me from the administration block. They took me to see a pleasant but firm lady and stayed with us while we filled in a form that was meant to give them all the information they needed about me. I asked her if I could have visitors. She nodded then told me with an apologetic air that they’d contacted my father and my mother so that they could be present when I was admitted to the hospital, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me for the moment. She tried to sound reassuring. It was often like that, she said. With time, things got ironed out.
“You have to understand them. Not only did you kill, but you killed members of your family, your father’s parents. It’s going to take time for them to think of you as part of the family again. Your psychiatrist may want to meet with them, so they’ll have to come here eventually. But don’t worry about that for now.”
She dismissed me with a smile. The two male nurses escorted me to my room. We must have walked nearly half a mile to get there. Everything was high, long and narrow in that hospital. The corridors were endless. In the section for non-criminal patients, we passed guys who were strolling around freely. Many looked like victims of an accident of birth, with foreheads low down over their eyebrows or huge dome-shaped heads. The only light came in through small windows high up in the walls, which didn’t improve their appearance any. Not a single one looked at me. They were in another place, a place I guessed you didn’t come back from. Some were twitchy, others waddled like hens. I would never have done them any harm, but frankly these people with their wandering brains made me nauseous.
The high-security wing was more like a prison than a hospital but at least the criminals looked normal. The few I passed anyway. At that hour of the afternoon, most people were in their rooms. Mine was as narrow as a trouser leg. There was no room to move between the closet and the bed. There was an unbarred window high up in the wall, which would have been out of reach for any ordinary man. The nurses apologized, saying that nobody had warned them of my size. They left me there for about half an hour, then came back and took me to a room that wasn’t much bigger but where I could at least turn around without bumping into the walls. When I saw that the toilets were outside, I realized I wasn’t here to be punished even though, apart from a few details, it was hard to tell the difference from a federal prison. And anyway, when you’re alone in a room, you get a new perspective on things. It may seem like a contradiction, but I started liking this room as much I’d liked the wide open spaces at other times. There was something reassuring about it. Through the window, which was six feet from the ground, I could see a strip of meadow in the distance, though it was mostly hidden by the wall and the barbed wire on top. I lay down on my bed and stayed there for about two hours, looking up at the ceiling and not thinking about anything, but feeling weirdly safe.
I couldn’t spend years in this hospital sleeping curled up. I called a guard and showed him that, quite honestly, I was about a foot longer than the bed. The uprights were solid and there was nothing you could do about it. He promised he’d have a look in the storeroom to see if there was a medical bed that might do the trick. I waited for dinnertime. I put on the uniform that was used for the most dangerous patients, which I’d found folded at the foot of my bed, and when the hooter sounded, a guard came and opened the door for me. Each inmate had to keep his distance from the others. We marched to the canteen, where we lined up in single file in front of steaming vats filled with food that was all mashed up so that it could be eaten without a knife. I chose a seat at random. It’s always risky to do that in prison. There’s always a guy or a gang that claims it. But here, there was no feeling of aggression. Nobody played the tough guy, there were no gangs trying to lay down the law, people looked at you without seeing you. Killers classified as mentally ill are fiercely individualistic and withdrawn. I’d even say, after the long years of experience I’ve had of them, that they’re scaredy-cats. Direct confrontation terrifies them. They resort to violence only when they’re sure they can lord it over a weaker victim. But I didn’t know that at the time. How could I have known? The other patients just stared at me, mostly out of the corners of their eyes. My size impressed them. Not so much the size itself, more the idea it must have given them of how I was when I was in action, when that famous “trigger” was pressed. Every one of the inmates who sat down next to me tended to ignore me, except for one guy pushing fifty who stood out because of his refined manner. He kept giving me these furtive smiles and winks as if we were accomplices. In what, I had no idea. I wondered if he was gay, even though I was never the kind of teenager people like that fantasized about. I noticed two or three really scary-looking guys, especially a man in his fifties who looked like a weird cross between an Indian chief and an Irish truck driver. His head was so big he’d have given a hat maker a heart attack, and his eyes were big and black, but what made it worse was that he was cross-eyed. The food was okay. Better than in prison, but then it could hardly have been worse. Nobody talked to me, though I could sense that some of them were itching to say something. They must have been curious to know what I was doing there at my age. A short, skinny guy, so ugly you’d have thought his parents had made him like that deliberately, sat down opposite me. He kept fidgeting on his chair and grimacing, and every thirty seconds a kind of contemptuous grin came over his face. He was bald, but not bald the way people are when they’re losing their hair. His hair looked as if it had never really grown, as if something had discouraged it. I could see he wanted to talk to me, but nothing came. After each attempt he stroked the top of his skull. The touch of foam at the corners of his lips made me feel nauseous, and I stopped looking at him so that I could finish my dinner in peace. When I don’t want to meet someone’s eyes, all I have to do is stare straight ahead of me, which puts me a long way above their heads. To use a military metaphor of my father’s, when I’m under fire I camouflage myself as the air. It’s a trick my father, who wasn’t much shorter than I was, often used. I saw him do it whenever my mother started screaming as if she was possessed. He would stand there with his arms folded, leaning against a wall, his eyes fixed straight ahead.
I resented the fact that he hadn’t put in a single appearance since my arrest. My mother was another matter. She must have been really angry. I’m sure she didn’t want to take time off because she’d have had to tell her office colleagues why. I wasn’t even sure she’d talked about it to my sisters. Or else I can imagine the conversation. The two girls come home, one from work, the other from school. My mother is sitting peeling potatoes. Fat is sizzling in a frying pan. They say hello without kissing. My mother’s new guy is in the living room. He’s reading the newspaper in the warmth, in his slippers because, without slippers, she wouldn’t have let him in the room. I couldn’t describe him to you, I’d already left when he took my father’s place. It didn’t take her long. My mother needs to get laid at least twice a day even if she never looks the guy in the face. Anyhow, that’s my analysis, based on a whole bunch of clues I gathered over the fourteen years that my parents slept above me on the first floor. But what she most needs is to yell at the guy as he’s zipping up his pants that she didn’t have an orgasm because he’s an ignoramus, a deadbeat who doesn’t know how to pleasure a woman—until they start all over again. Anyway, my sisters come home. Without looking up, my mother says, “Your brother killed your grandparents.” My younger sister, who has the brains of a halibut, must have asked straight out, “Which ones?” even though she knows our other grandparents died a long time ago and we never knew them. As for my older sister, I can just see her saying, “Son of a bitch!” as she opens the refrigerator to look for something substantial she can wolf down before dinner. By the time she’s found her snack, the news has faded from her mind. Nothing ever affects her. I’ve never seen her either happy or sad and, even when she’s being mean, you sense she’s forcing herself, that it doesn’t come naturally. As for being nice, that requires too much imagination, she can’t grasp the concept.
When dinner was over, we filed back to our rooms. The guard locked mine. I asked him where I could get something to read. He told me he would do me a favor and, just this once, bring me a magazine with my medication, but that I’d have access to the library the next day. The magazine and the medication arrived half an hour later. I didn’t ask what the medication was for. I assumed it was to treat the sickness that had led me to kill my grandparents. I was only on the third page of the magazine, leering at Marilyn Monroe’s ass—she’d been dead for more than a year and a half, but that didn’t make the picture any less sexy—when I felt my eyelids grow heavy. The nice little fantasies I’d been preparing for myself couldn’t resist the sleeping pill I’d been given and I slept without any nightmares, which was something that had never happened to me before.
When I woke up, I felt weak. All the same, before breakfast I instinctively cut out the photo of Marilyn Monroe, folded it, and put it in my closet. The meal was even more silent than the day before, although two or three of the patients seemed as wound up as toys. The others started staring at me again. My age intrigued them. I was the youngest by far. Once I’d finished my coffee and the revolting doughnut that went with it, I was taken back to my room to wait for my first session with the psychiatrist. I fell asleep again as if I had years of sleep to catch up on. A male nurse came and woke me, and although I was unsteady on my feet I followed him into a room that looked like a police interrogation room with a glass partition for the staff to look through to make sure the doctor wasn’t in any danger. I sat there for a moment without doing anything and ended up falling asleep again with my head on the table in front of me and my arms dangling. A nurse immediately woke me.