Paul knocked on the shatter-glass window. I got up from the thin mattress and pushed my hands through the letterbox as directed. Paul clipped on a pair of handcuffs. I'd never been handcuffed before and the weight of the cold steel was oddly pleasurable around my wrists.
Paul unlocked the door and led me into the lunch room where the huge man (now clothed) and Raven were sitting handcuffed and chained to separate hexagonal tables. Paul sat me down and chained me to my own table. I sat there in silence while Raven stared at me with his cruel eyes, and the black guy hummed a happy little tune.
The next inmate Paul brought in was an older man, in his sixties, with a patch over one eye. Then came what looked like an overstuffed child; his cheeks flushed red, his eyes like bananas, his shock of hair slimy with sweat. He made a lot of noise as he was hauled in. An imbecile. The last man to be brought in could have been a university professor. Salt and pepper hair, with a proper manner, a measured step, and a cordial nod towards the rest of us as he entered. He smelled strongly of tobacco and reminded me of my old maths teacher; I felt immediately drawn to him.
But whoever was in cell three remained there.
Paul brought our food on those metal lunch trays with the moulded depressions. In the centre square was a sandwich, cut diagonally. An apple in the upper right corner, a yogurt in lower left corner, a plastic spoon in the long cutlery slot along the bottom. The milk carton had a straw.
The chain affixing me to the table was just long enough that I could reach my mouth. I peeled back the top layer of bread and found a thin layer of tuna mayonnaise.
"Fish protein," said Raven. "Smells like cunt but it's good for your brains."
"Better than ants, anyway," sniggered the one-eyed man.
I watched the imbecile squish his sandwich into a dough-ball. The huge man demolished his in a couple bites. The Professor ate methodically, chewing each mouthful thoughtfully and pausing before taking the next bite.
"Twenty-six," he said suddenly. He turned to me with a teacherly smile. "It's important to chew your food thoroughly in order to let it mix with the saliva. This allows it to be more effectively digested. Twenty-six chews has been shown to be optimal. The use of a straw when drinking has a similar benefit. Oh, and in fact the tuna is not better than ants. Insects are extremely high in protein and omega three fatty oils, whereas tuna has protein but lacks any such good fats which are critical to brain function."
He didn't say anything more.
I went to eat my food but the imbecile began choking on his dough-ball and when Paul gave him a few pats on the back the one-eyed man shouted: "Hey! Hey! That's police brutality, that is! Get off him you fucking nazi!"
We got thrown back in our cells before I could start my sandwich.
*
Group Therapy began at 3pm. The same room as lunch, the same hexagonal tables to which we were chained. Doctor Wheeler stood beside the whiteboard at the front of the room and proceeded to explain the objective of the day's lesson. He was immediately interrupted by Raven who wanted to know who the "little boy" was.
"This is Isaac. He'll be staying with us a short while."
"Isaac? That's a Jew name."
"Genesis 20:03," cut in the Professor. "'And Abraham named his son who had been born to him, whom Sarah had borne to him, Isaac.' It comes from the Hebrew word meaning to laugh."
"Laugh? Oh so yous a funny boy, are you? Well go on then, funny Jew boy. Tell us a joke. Make us laugh, funny little Jew boy."
You will sympathise when I tell you I had no retort. This wasn't some snarky schoolboy, it was a full grown psychopath who'd probably murdered the last person to cross him. The funny little Jew boy looked pleadingly at Doctor Wheeler who for a worrying moment seemed more interested in my reaction than helping me. Mercifully though, his responsibility quickly got the better of him.
"That's enough, Raven. Now if you'll all open your books, we'll begin."
Doctor Wheeler's therapeutical approach was to examine the unconscious mind through artistic expression. He passed out some notebooks and each lesson the inmates would take ten minutes to compose something which they then read aloud to the group. Raven was called upon first and proceeded to spew a hateful limerick full of racial slurs. When Doctor Wheeler asked him why he'd written such a thing, he only leered in my direction and shrugged. The huge man had an absurdly high pitched voice and trilled a short story about a goat getting lost in the mountains. The imbecile had drawn a cat. The one-eyed man began to tell us about a sexual encounter involving his empty eye-socket but Doctor Wheeler cut him off after only a few sentences. Finally the Professor stood up and delivered the piece he'd entitled: Nighttime.
There would be little point in relating the Professor's next words, or indeed any of his compositions that I heard during my stay, for the words themselves are but utter banality. The Professor would merely describe an everyday scene such as woman doing laundry alone in her home or an elderly man sitting on a park bench watching the playground—and yet, as I sat there listening to his measured tone, to the slow and deliberate delivery with which he perfectly enunciated each innocent word, I began to feel ill. And by the time he had finished I knew I had been damaged. Not physically, you understand, more… emotionally—spiritually.
It was a feeling not exclusive to me either, for in the deathly silence that followed, the one-eyed man stared stoically at the floor, Raven sat rigid with his jaw clenched, the huge man had stopped humming, and Doctor Wheeler had taken off his horn-rimmed glasses and was pinching his nose. Only the imbecile seemed unmoved.
"You need to get out of here," said the spider in my cell.
"I can't. I won't give her the satisfaction."
"Then maybe you do belong in here."
I had no appetite that evening nor could I sleep that night. The next morning passed slowly. I barely ate lunch. At my second group therapy session, Doctor Wheeler drew a large oval on the whiteboard in red marker, around which he wrote different emotions in block capitals. ANGER, JEALOUSY, LUST, etc. He told us that the oval represented a mirror inside of which we were to imagine someone important to us.
"Tell this person how they make you feel," he said. "Use the words I have listed to help you."
I'd read somewhere that sociopaths didn't have empathy, and sometimes the ability to understand emotions altogether. The article cited a teenage girl who'd done horrible, unspeakable things to her own family, only to stand bewildered when they called the police.
Doctor Wheeler called me to the whiteboard. "It's all right. Go ahead."
I stared at the oval. "Um…"
"Who do you see?"
I hesitated. "My… stepmother?"
"And what do you want to say to her? Which emotion?"
I searched the words he'd written on the whiteboard, very conscious of the fact I'd been chosen first in order to demonstrate how a healthy, non-sociopath, dealt with their emotions. "I… I resent you for sending me here."
I glanced at Doctor Wheeler who then asked the rest of the group if they could sympathise with the emotion I had chosen.
"No!" shouted the one-eyed man. "Stepmother, is it? I bleeding loved my stepmother." And he proceeded to tell just how much he loved her until Doctor Wheeler once again cut him off for the vulgar imagery. "Lawrence, what do you think?"
The Professor cleared his throat. "I would suggest that anger, or possibly hate, is more likely what you're feeling. Resentment, on the other hand, is a feeling of indignation at having been treated unfairly, and so is more appropriate to your father. I would imagine an intense feeling of betrayal in that direction too, hence the reason for your initial hesitation. You first saw your father, but having not yet owned up to your feelings there, you twisted the image to that of your stepmother upon whom you are much more comfortable casting your hateful spotlight. I take it your birth mother is a taboo subject in the home?"
Doctor Wheeler did not let me answer but the veracity was palpable. My father did not keep pictures of my mother around the house; only a single framed photograph in his office desk, of which my stepmother knew nothing. Growing up, I had frequently sought it out. My mother's name was Sophie. She was French and very beautiful. In the photograph she was performing a perfect pirouette across a grand stage, her long dark hair sweeping gracefully behind her. She'd been a dancer in the Paris Opera. My father had gone to see a performance and she had captivated him completely. After I'd killed her, my father had set up a scholarship in her name but did not himself attend the opera anymore.
But did I hate my father? Hate? I reflected on it for the next few days, examining his enmity not only from my perspective but also his. In the end it didn't matter, for on my sixth day at the asylum, Doctor Wheeler called me into his office and told me that my father had died.