When Roy was eighteen years old, he learned that an old friend of his from the neighborhood, Eddie Derwood, had attempted suicide by placing a plastic bag over his head in an effort to asphyxiate himself. Eddie, Roy was told, had been committed to the Illiniwek Psychiatric Institute in Chicago, where he was undergoing treatment for severe depression. Roy was away at school when he received this news in a letter from a mutual friend, and when he returned to Chicago for the Christmas holidays, he went to see Eddie.
Roy did not know why Eddie Derwood, with whom he had been friends all through high school and had played with on many baseball, football, and basketball teams, had tried to kill himself. This was a mystery to Roy and Eddie’s other friends, too, since Eddie had always seemed like a happy guy. Derwood was smart, handsome and well-liked by almost everyone in the neighborhood. He had gone off to college in Wisconsin, and two months into his freshman year his roommate found him unconscious on the floor of their dormitory room with the plastic bag over his head secured by rubber bands around his neck.
The Illiniwek Psychiatric Institute was a large, ugly brown brick building. Snow was falling lightly but insistently as Roy entered, registered at the reception desk as a visitor and was told to wait until an attendant arrived to escort him to the fourth floor, where Eddie Derwood was housed. Two other people were in the waiting room: an old man with a week’s growth of white whiskers on his face, wearing a green hat with earflaps and a dark blue overcoat with a gray, fake fur collar; and a woman who looked to be in her late thirties or early forties, perhaps the old man’s daughter, or even granddaughter, whose bleached blonde hair with black roots showing was partially covered by a bright red scarf, and whose thin, red cloth coat, Roy thought, could hardly succeed in keeping her warm. She was very skinny and had a long, sharply pointed nose that she kept wiping with a black handkerchief.
“Are you all right?” the woman asked the old man.
“Louise,” he said, “you always ask the most terrible questions.”
A large, powerful-looking man with carrot-colored hair brushed to a point on the crown of his head, wearing a dirty white smock, entered the waiting room and called Roy’s name. Roy walked over to the man and stood in front of him.
“You here to see Derwood?” the man asked.
“I am,” said Roy.
The man turned around and walked away. Roy followed him. They took an elevator to the fourth floor and got off. The attendant walked swiftly ahead without looking back and stopped in front of a door with the number 404 on it. He turned and faced Roy.
“You don’t give him nothin’,” said the attendant. “You don’t take nothin’ he try to give you. Don’t touch him, even if he touch you. Don’t say nothin’ could disturb him. You do, I put you out real fast. You understand?”
Roy nodded.
The man opened the door and entered the room, followed by Roy. Eddie Derwood was standing in front of the only window. There were bars on it.
“Person to see you,” said the attendant.
“Hi, Eddie,” said Roy.
Eddie did not say anything. His eyes were foggy and the corners of his mouth had white crust on them.
“It’s me, Roy. Don’t you recognize me?”
Eddie stared at Roy for thirty seconds before saying, “You’re just a bird, a big, dark bird without wings.”
“I’m your friend, Eddie. I’m Roy.”
Eddie stood still. His eyes did not move and did not blink.
“Is he on drugs?” Roy asked the attendant. “His eyes are messed up.”
“You don’t know that,” he said.
“That’s why I asked you,” said Roy. “He’s like a zombie.”
The attendant went over to Eddie, bent down and put his face close to Eddie’s. The attendant’s body completely blocked Roy’s view of his friend.
“You need somethin’, Mr. Derwood?” the attendant said.
Eddie squawked like a crow.
“Caw! Caw!” he said.
The attendant straightened up and turned back to Roy.
“Visit’s over,” he said.
The attendant took Roy firmly by his right arm and led him out of the room, closing the door behind him. In the elevator going down were two men besides Roy and the attendant. Both of them wore thick-lensed eyeglasses and had wild, curly hair like Larry Fine of the Three Stooges.
“Don’t ever say that again,” one of them said to the other.
“Say what?” said his companion.
“That you run this place.”
“But I do.”
“No, you don’t. I do.”
The elevator stopped at the ground floor, the door opened and Roy got off. The attendant and the two curly-haired passengers stayed on. The door closed and the elevator started going back up.
The old man and the younger woman were no longer in the waiting room. Roy walked out of the building. It was snowing harder and the air seemed colder, but Roy decided to walk for a while before taking a bus back to his neighborhood.
The only time Roy could remember Eddie Derwood losing his temper was once when they were fifteen at Eddie’s house and his mother told Eddie that he was not as smart as his older brother, Burton. Eddie sprang from his chair like a leopard catapulting out of a tree onto an unsuspecting passing animal and grabbed his mother with both hands around her throat, pinning her against a wall. Eddie held her there for several seconds before letting go. He did not say a word and neither did his mother. Eddie sat down and his mother left the room. Roy did not go back to Eddie’s house again for a long time after that.