Hargreaves Makes a Request
The madman and the doctor want the same thing. This does not make either of them mad.
Hargreaves || Alliance || Plan || Action
She went to Hargreaves the next morning with the directness she had decided to deploy across all her third-floor relationships, now that she understood enough to discard the protective indirection of clinical caution. She sat down across from him and said: “I found Dr. Carey.” Hargreaves looked at her for a long moment. His face did the thing that faces do when they receive information they have been waiting for long enough that the receipt of it is almost more than the containment available. He absorbed it. He held it. He said, very quietly: “Is he all right?” “He’s been in Room Seven for eight months,” she said. “He’s thin and he’s been restrained at the wrists and his voice has the quality of someone who hasn’t spoken freely in a very long time. He is, in every other respect, entirely himself.” “He was always very hard to shake,” Hargreaves said, with the tone of someone paying a professional compliment to a colleague they respect. Then: “What are you planning?” She had thought carefully about how much to tell each of her allies — how much each needed to know to be useful, and how much the knowing might endanger them if Voss became aware that a coordination was occurring. With Hargreaves she decided: everything. He was the one who had seen most clearly from the beginning, who had maintained his clarity under four years of institutional pressure to abandon it, and who had, she had come to believe, a quality of strategic intelligence that would be wasted by giving him less than the full picture.
She told him everything. The Kehl connection. The 1941 fire. The methodology. Bruck’s analysis. The patient file in her own name. The anonymous letter of appointment. He listened without interrupting, with the focused attention of someone who is simultaneously processing what he’s hearing and integrating it with his own four years of observation, and when she finished he was quiet for forty-five seconds — she counted — before speaking. “The file with your name,” he said. “1959. Did you read the handwriting at the bottom? Do not allow patient to return to facility.” “Yes.” “That wasn’t Voss’s instruction,” he said. “Voss brought you back. That instruction was written by whoever wanted to protect you. Someone at the Institute, in 1960, after you were discharged, wrote that to try to prevent exactly what has happened.” He paused. “Which means someone here then was on the right side of this. Someone who is no longer here, or who is still here and has been unable to act in the intervening years.” The implication organized itself between them without either of them having to say it directly. Someone at Coldmoor in 1960 had tried to protect her and had failed, or had been silenced, or was still here twenty-two years later in the form of a seventy-one-year-old musicologist who had been resisting a methodology for eleven years and documenting it with the systematic attention of someone who hoped that documentation, someday, would be of use to someone. She looked at Hargreaves. “I need to get everyone out,” she said. “Carey first, because the risk to him is most immediate. Then the third-floor patients. Then all the second-floor patients. Then out of the valley when the road clears.” He nodded slowly. “And Voss?” She held his gaze. “Voss,” she said, “is the part I am still working on.”