then he wouldn’t stop them.
This time they put him in with the geriatrics.
It was another ward that was usually sleepy and subdued, for only the very old ended up there. Many of the inmates weren’t even all that mad, they were just too infirm to survive on their own, and had no one else to look after them. Others, however, had retreated into deep senility. They drooled, they leered, they smiled and laughed, and sometimes they yelled and cried, but mostly—thanks to the pills they were given morning and night—they dozed in silence. The foreigner, admittedly, was too young to belong there. Although exactly how old he was, no one knew. With his smooth, burnt skin, he didn’t look any particular age. Not young. But not old either.
In any event, he had a peculiar effect on the geriatrics. One old man complained that he was not getting any sleep because the foreigner was climbing out of bed and dancing all night. Other patients concurred. But the orphan knew it wasn’t so. She checked the ward regularly on her evening rounds, and the foreigner never moved. His bedclothes were never even ruffled. Then one morning an old woman, a vague, timid creature who had never made any sort of fuss, was discovered completely naked upon the foreigner’s bed, legs astride his hips, shuddering back and forth in delight. When she was dragged away, she insisted that he had lured her there and possessed her with his eyes and that she would love him till she died. But even while she was on top of him, the man had remained as limp and unconscious as ever.
That was enough for the nurses. Clearly the foreigner was a devil (that word again) of some kind. They wanted him shifted once more. The old doctor was doubtful. It didn’t matter what the old people claimed, he said. They were mad, they imagined things. But the nurses insisted. Of course, they weren’t educated people like the old doctor. They were just working women from the town, full of strange stories and superstitions. But the hospital couldn’t run without them, and so somewhere had to be found to keep the foreigner quietly out of their way.
One option was to lose him among the general community, the everyday mad folk who made up the bulk of the hospital’s inmates. But those wards were chaotic places, full of yelling and running and wrestling, and in fairness, no one thought they were a fitting home for a man who was bedridden and immobile.
Someone then suggested the locked ward. Usually, only violent patients were sent there, to be kept in individual cells, with barred windows, and with strong male nurses on hand. Still, the foreigner would certainly be out of the way. (Indeed, the orphan would never have seen him again.) But the nurses protested. If he had disturbed the otherwise peaceful catatonics and geriatrics so much, what might result if he was placed in proximity to inmates who were already aggressive and unstable?
Somewhere he would do no harm, that’s where he had to go.
In the end, they settled on the crematorium.
The crematorium was the nicest of all the back wards. It was somewhat separate from the rest, being contained in a thick-walled bunker that was semi-detached from one end of the main building, accessible only through a single passageway. A large furnace had once been installed there to burn the hospital’s rubbish—including, from time to time, body parts. The stump of a chimney, its upper reaches collapsed, still rose next to one wall. But these days the hospital waste was taken away by truck and the furnace had long ago been removed. The bunker now hosted a cosy little ward with its own dayroom and two small bedrooms.
Such privacy was a rare thing, and reserved for just four lucky patients. They had been placed in the crematorium, these four, mainly because they were the most stable and reliable of the inmates, and thus could be left largely to themselves. Which was not to say they weren’t mad. They assuredly were. It was just that their madness was different. More…coherent. Indeed, the orphan had always found that their particular kind of madness reminded her closely of her own. And the word she had heard used most often to describe the four of them was this—delusional.
It meant, she knew, they believed things that weren’t real. They didn’t spit or rave, but nor did they live in the same world as everyone else. There were two men in one of the bedrooms, and two women in the other. The orphan could never remember their names, of course, but she had titles for each of them, learnt from the nurses.
They were: the duke, the witch, the archangel and the virgin.
Strangely enough, the orphan herself, in her fourteen years at the hospital, had never actually been diagnosed as mad. On the contrary, the nurses had discovered, even when she was a child, that she could be put to good use around the wards. Schoolwork may have been beyond her, but if she was shown how to perform simple tasks, then she was entirely capable. So they had taught her how to mop floors, and how to make beds, and how to bathe the patients and help them change clothes, and how to perform all sorts of other minor but necessary duties about the hospital. The work made the orphan happy, because it was such a relief to be useful to someone at last.
Nevertheless, she knew that there was madness in her.
It wasn’t just that she was retarded. Retarded wasn’t the same as insane, she was sure of that. Her mind was slow maybe, filled with fog, and understanding always came hard, but that wasn’t madness. The madness involved her other senses, her special senses. The things she felt and saw and heard that no one else did. The way she could read the movements of the sky, for example. No one else could do that, and it wasn’t simply a seeing thing or a smelling thing, it was a kind of reaching out from herself into the air—in fact, a way of becoming the air…well, she didn’t know precisely how she did it, she just knew that she could, and had always been able to.
That, of course, had to be a delusion. There was no surer indicator of insanity than the act of seeing or hearing or feeling things that no one else could.
Except…Was it still madness if the supposed delusion was proven real? After all, she genuinely could predict the weather. Everyone knew it.
Ah yes, but there was a madman in one of the wards with an even rarer ability. He could read minds. If someone stood near him and thought of a colour, he could always guess which colour it was. Always. He was never wrong.
But so what? It didn’t make him sane. The same man was incapable of feeding or dressing himself. He was a useless oddity, that was all. Perhaps the orphan herself was no better. Perhaps no one was, in the whole madhouse.
The duke was a straight-backed old gentleman, and his delusion was that he owned the hospital, and that the staff were supposed to take orders from him, not the other way around. He thought he was a rich man. In fact, he claimed to own virtually the entire island, which was why the nurses had laughingly given him his nickname. In reality, though, he was only a poor man. No rich men ever came to the back wards.
The orphan liked the duke very much, for he was always kind to her, and softly spoken. He had been permitted to live unsupervised in the crematorium for years, and she used to wonder why he was in hospital at all, for his madness seemed so benign. But then one day she heard that for the first decade of his confinement, he had been kept in a cell in the locked ward. He had then been considered the most violent and dangerous man on the premises. It was almost impossible to believe, looking at him now. He passed the bulk of his days merely wandering the grounds, or gently working in the gardens.
The orphan too liked wandering the grounds. They were red and bare and dusty in the dry season, and red and bare and muddy in the wet, but still there was a kind of beauty in them. Occasionally she would walk with the duke, and it pleased her that he seemed to see the beauty too, if only through his dementia.
Then there was the witch, who believed that she could cast magic spells. She was a bent old woman, and ugly, and most of her time was spent hunched over her collection of chicken bones, pronouncing curses or blessings upon the world. She wasn’t supposed to have the bones, the orphan knew, and now and then the nurses would confiscate her collection, but she always managed to forage more from the kitchen rubbish.