Crazy for Cornelia (33 page)

“We’ll get you some new clothing from the Sanctuary Boutique tomorrow,” Tim said. “There’s a brochure on the side table to
help you get acquainted.”

Kevin looked around the room. A built-in wall TV so he couldn’t get at the electrical cords and strangle himself. The thick
carpet matched the emerald walls, with one framed print of brown and white ducks on each wall. There were no windows.

Kevin entered the bathroom. He laid his toothbrush on what he assumed was a marble-covered vanity. A bar of soap carved with
an S lay in a gilt dish. When he touched the top of the vanity, he realized that the marble was actually painted rubber. He
tapped the mirror that stretched to the ceiling and discovered plastic, not glass. The rooms were psycho-proofed.

“You’ll be here overnight,” Tim said. “We’ll wake you up early for breakfast. Whichever wing you’re assigned to, you’ll be
quite comfortable. Sleep tight, Mr. Doyle.”

Tim shut the door with a firm ker-chunk behind him. A dead-lock.

Kevin bounced up and down on the cushy bed. Somebody had left a gold-foil-wrapped piece of chocolate, also carved with an
S. In the closet, he found a fluffy white terry cloth bathrobe with a pink and green logo on the pocket. He undressed and
put on the bathrobe.

Kevin lay on the bed feeling clean and imagining Cornelia’s lovely lips curving around her piece of Sanctuary chocolate.

The lights suddenly cut off. He lay in darkness, fumbling for the lamp beside him and knocked it onto the floor. It fell with
a thud, probably made of rubber.

“Good night, Mr….” cooed the recorded voice coming from the air vent. It changed tenor slightly as it personalized, “… Doyle.”

The rigorous test battery fell short of Harold’s warning.

They had put him in a small white room with a table and two chairs similar to the Stinson Gallery. The psychologist had stringy
hair and was named Rudin. She looked bored for an hour while he answered her MMQ questions, with all the appropriate responses
a “1003.1 Delusional Disorders, Grandiose” type of patient would make.

After a lunch of chicken salad sandwiches on thin white bread with the crust removed, an aide escorted Kevin back to the white
room. His doctor was a smartly dressed, oval-faced woman in her forties with warm red lipstick and an almost motherly concern.
She greeted him with a husky, soothing voice that made him glad to be with her instead of a colder, more clinical kind of
doctor. Or a self-serving ferret like Cornelia’s therapist.

“Hello, Kevin,” she smiled. “I’m Dr. Lester, and I’ll be your therapist. Tell me what brought you here.”

“The Raj Limousine Service. But my name is Sebastian.”

“I see,” Dr. Lester reached into a thin briefcase by the side of her chair and took out a stack of cardboard sheets, holding
the top one up so Doyle could see an inkblot.

“Kevin, please describe what you see for me. There aren’t any right or wrong answers.”

The smear looked like two men with swords.

“Gladiators.”

She made a brief note on a pad. “American Gladiators?”

“Whatever. They fight to amuse our citizens.”

She jotted another note, and tried a general-reality question. “And how many citizens are we talking about?”

“Since we crushed the Goths, about one million.”

She stopped writing and looked up at him, then put her pen down.

“Sebastian,” Dr. Lester asked evenly, “what year is this?”

“295 anno Domini.”

Dr. Lester stuffed her inkblots back into the briefcase. “Do you have any questions you’d like to ask
me?
”

“What’s Code Green?”

Her mouth almost turned up into a grin but she restrained herself. “Let’s just say you’ll never have to worry about leaving
us before you’re good and ready. The Sanctuary is set up on a system of rewards. If you work hard in our therapy over the
next week, you’ll earn the right to go to activities. Classes, walks outdoors, evening socials with the women patients.”

“Socials with women?”

“Do you like women?”

“Yes. I feel better when women are around.”

“The women patients stay in separate wings from the men.”

“Why?” Kevin tried not to look too anxious.

“Those are the rules,” she told him firmly. “But we’ll have an agreement. If you cooperate with the staff and work hard on
your therapy with me, I promise you’ll get to go to evening socials very soon. Just remember one important rule; no physical
contact. You can’t touch another patient. Now, tell me, are there any times when you’re
not
Sebastian?”

“I’m tired now. Can I go back to my room?”

A
fter two weeks in the Sanctuary, exasperation had worn Cornelia out more than the drugs or the mind-crushing tedium of her
daily routine.

Eat. Therapy. Eat. Watch
All My Children
. Meds. Eat.

They served all the patients on pink plastic plates in the small dining room of her wing, Astor II. The food was too high
in caloric value for a sedentary lifestyle. Her daily menu card boasted of “quenelles” and “boeuf nouvel,” but proved to be
a pretentious guise for institutional food heavy on macaroni and cheese, Swiss steaks, and tapioca dolled up in fancy molds.
She had already developed a minor potbelly.

She couldn’t drag herself, much as she wanted to, from the mirror. Her face looked wan, and slightly greasy from the institutional
food. Tonight, when the meds had ground down and she felt more able to lift her weighty arms, she would do some jumping jacks.
Then she’d have the small satisfaction of a task completed.

At least she had not completely lost her work ethic.

Corny tried to tie the sash around her bathrobe but couldn’t find it. Giving up, she decided to shuffle out with her robe
open, revealing her black bikini underwear, her breasts, her small belly. Or maybe she should just go back to sleep. It was
what they all wanted.

No. A line must be drawn
.

Struggling, Cornelia tied the robe, slowly and carefully, in a running bowline knot recalled from her sailing lessons so long
ago, and walked to the dayroom to sit with other patients. She had a friend, of sorts, nicknamed Creamcheese for the white
pallor of her skin.

The women of Astor II, diverse in age and behavioral quirks, shared little in common other than the imminent risk of falling
completely off the planet.

Her own thoughts, while infinitely slower than usual, still managed to pierce the veil of her medication. She thought about
Chester and Tucker occasionally.

But she thought about Kevin Doyle at least once every ten minutes.

He wanted to shout “Corny” through every doorway he passed.

Instead he joined the patients chanting about a “yellow brick road” as they marched through the tunnels, inspired by the bright
yellow bathroom tiles that covered the walls.

Located beneath the Sanctuary, protected from the elements, the tunnel system served as the asylum’s highways and byways.
Staff could move around the hospital easily, and high-security patients could be transported through the passageways using
locked metal doors at each crossing.

Kevin bounced along with two other patients from his new wing, Vanderbilt II. He had already been moved up from Vanderbilt
I, considered a step up on the hierarchy of sanity. Two beefy male aides escorted his group.

Kevin watched his wing mate Richard, who had zipped his massive layers of baby fat into a tight-fitting, all-cotton jogging
suit. Kevin resisted the staff’s attempted makeover for him using country-club style outfits from the Sanctuary Boutique,
which they added onto his Platinum Health Plan. They had bought him a green blazer, pleated flannel slacks, some button-down
oxford shirts, and several ties with the S logo. Instead, Kevin dressed in his old jeans with the patched knees, sweatshirts,
and turtlenecks.

He watched Richard march ahead, oblivious to the others, tossing a Maalox bottle high in the air almost to the yellow ceiling,
just far
enough ahead that he could catch the plastic bottle easily without modifying his speed or gait. He looked into middle space,
his big round face placid. Today, as usual, he recited airframe specifications in a monotone.

“Messerschmitt 262, first jet fighter…”

“Richard, what did you do on the outside?” Kevin whispered to him.

“Aeronautical engineer,” Richard snapped in a higher-pitched voice, annoyed to break his recitation.

“You do any commercial planes?” In case his plans ever called for air travel.

Richard smiled enigmatically. “I was a bad boy,” he cackled.

The aides steered Richard and Kevin into the group therapy room. His pulse quickening, Kevin scanned the group of eight or
ten people making a fuss settling into a circle of chairs.

The group consisted of ten men and women in various stages of disturbance, many dressed in a severely wardrobe-challenged
style. The men wore what looked like expensive clothing, no grunge or real shab-biness, but mixed and matched badly. One older
patient, with a pink face and small nose like a rabbit’s, wore only one sock but a perfectly knotted tie under his green Sanctuary
blazer. The women, most of them young, favored mismatched sports clothes, tops, and slacks. Neither the men nor the women,
no matter how loony, wore anything other than textured wools and cottons—not an ounce of polyester.

He studied the patients carefully. They displayed various facial tics and other traits which Kevin knew to be a sign of either
their problems or a reaction to the drugs used to manage their problem.

But none of the patients was Cornelia.

Kevin’s therapist, Dr. Lester, was in charge of group therapy. She already sat in the center chair.

“Good morning, Richard,” Dr. Lester spoke soothingly. “Hello, Kevin.”

Some of the group muttered greetings, tense and wary.

The door opened again and Cornelia entered with an aide.

She stood with her perfect legs in tight blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater. Her blond thatch fell over her forehead
artlessly, and her skin looked slightly pasty and transparent from being kept indoors.
Kevin thought that tiny flaw made her even more beautiful. Her eyes seemed washed out, the sparkling points of violet submerged
in the gray as she tried to smile.

Then she saw him and reared back. She looked so startled, he worried that she would fall over backward. Her gray dull eyes
blinked. When they opened, the little violet stars made a round bouquet for him.

“Hi, Cornelia,” Dr. Lester greeted her.

She walked very slowly to a chair directly across from Kevin and sat carefully, not taking her eyes off him.

“This is Kevin. He prefers to be called Sebastian,” Dr. Lester watched them. “Cornelia, do you know Sebastian?”

“Not personally,” she replied slowly, as if considering the possibility for the first time. “He looks like a painting I’ve
seen.”

Kevin sat in the dayroom of Vanderbilt II, his medium-security wing.

It was decorated in the hospital’s plush green and pink motif, like country clubs he’d seen in movies. The only way he could
identify it as a hospital ward was by the glass nurses’ station. It jutted out into the room like a giant tollbooth with a
young nursing staff in white uniforms bustling around inside.

Tonight, a “Happy New Year” sign had been hung carelessly across the nurses’ station. Patients were rounded up from their
private rooms and corralled into the dayroom to socialize. Most looked as though they’d rather be sleeping off their meds.
They stared blankly at their party hats, tried to open their baby-proofed party poppers.

Kevin tried to wrap his mind around the New Year spirit with the rest of his only moderately disturbed wing mates. He declined
a funny hat out of a sense of dignity, but accepted a plastic glass of bubbling nonalcoholic champagne.

“Hail,” he toasted the other patients and the staff so new or despised by their supervisors that they drew shift duty on New
Year’s Eve. Then they all sang a ragged chorus of “Auld Lange Syne.”

When the staff retreated to hold a glum party of their own inside their glass-wrapped room, one of the student nurses named
Ms. Bab-cock approached him. Kevin liked Ms. Babcock. She had regular,
pretty Irish features like Marne, and wore dark hair pulled in a tight bun under her cap.

“Happy New Year, Sebastian,” she said to Kevin. “You have a visitor.”

Kevin followed Ms. Babcock to the visitors room. His visitor hadn’t arrived yet. The windowless room was empty except for
the floral print couch facing two chairs and a still-life print of flowers on the wall. Flowers were supposed to be soothing,
he had heard, but they overdid them and the result was more like jungle rot.

He would have to stay in character. He quickly stripped to his underwear, so he looked more like Saint Sebastian, naked except
for his white loincloth. He stood bravely and looked toward the ceiling like a martyr searching for a sign.

He heard a harsh laugh as the door closed.

“Cute,” Marne told him. “But it’s only me.”

Kevin sat down in a plump chair next to his sister.

“Where’s Dad?”

“Couldn’t come. He had a double shift. He said to tell you, he’s proud to have a saint in the family.”

“I left him laughing his ass off, Marne. It’s like he finally got one over on Eddie.”

She shrugged. “He’s not upset at you or anything. But he won’t say the psychiatrists are wrong either. He thinks you’re crazy
for doing this.”

“You think maybe Dad has too much faith in authority figures?”

“Somebody’s got to.”

“What about Helen?”

Marne said. “She doesn’t ask, I don’t tell. So do you see Cornelia tonight?”

“She’s on her wing. I start socials next weekend.”

“Wing? Socials?” Marne rolled her eyes. “So now what?”

“Now I have to spend some time with her, just the two of us. No relatives, lawyers, boyfriend.” He still couldn’t handle the
word “fiancé.” “She’s not really crazy. It’s just that nobody tries to understand her.”