Hargreaves Walks Outside
Freedom is not dramatic. It is a Tuesday morning with open sky.
Hargreaves || Freedom || Emotion || Light
The moment she would remember most precisely from that first day in Marten was not the conversation with the police, not the subsequent hours of testimony and documentation, not the arrival by afternoon of the regional medical authority’s representatives, not the moment when the duty officer said, with the careful gravity of a man who has just understood the scale of what he has received, that a team was being sent up the mountain. It was this: Thomas Hargreaves, who had been inside the Coldmoor Institute for four years, going to the door of the police station and opening it and stepping outside onto the pavement in the winter morning air of a town he had last seen four years ago, and standing there. Standing in the thin December sunlight with his face turned upward and his eyes closed. Just standing. Not moving. Not speaking. Breathing in the air of a place that was not the Institute. He stood there for approximately three minutes, and nobody spoke to him, and nobody hurried him, and Nora watched him from inside the station with the feeling that this was the point of everything — not the documentation, not the legal process that was now beginning, not even Carey being released from Room Seven, though all of those things were enormous. This was the point: a man standing in open air after four years, letting the open air be what it was. She thought of Irene Marsh, who had eighteen years of perfect memory and who was currently in the town’s small medical facility being assessed by a doctor who knew nothing about hypermnesic psychosis and would need significant guidance. She thought of Bruck, who was in the station behind her dictating from memory sixty-three pages of documented observation to a police typist who was working very fast. She thought of Carey, who was in the medical facility on a cot, finally sleeping, sleeping with the completeness of a person who has not slept safely in eight months and is making up for all of it at once. She watched Hargreaves in the doorway of the police station on the first morning of December in a small mountain town and thought: I did this. We did this. It was worth every single day of it.
The formal investigation was opened that afternoon. Two members of the regional criminal authority drove up the mountain road on the same partial thaw that the convoy had used, finding it navigable with the right vehicle and a certain amount of determination. They reached Coldmoor by two o’clock. By four o’clock they had sent word to Marten by radio: Voss was present, cooperative in the specific way of someone who has decided that cooperation is now his best position, and the building was being secured. By five o’clock: Room Seven had been examined by the investigators. Nora received this information by telephone in the police station and asked one question. The investigator on the other end paused before answering. “There is,” he said, with the careful diction of a man choosing his words in relation to something he has not been trained to describe, “a room beyond the room you’ve described. There is a — presence. In the room beyond.” A pause. “We have called for additional personnel. Personnel with a different kind of expertise.” She understood this. She said: “I know. I’ve been there.” Another pause. “Then you understand,” the investigator said, “why this is going to be a complex case.” “Yes,” she said. “I do. But the patients are out of the building. That’s what matters first.” He agreed. She put the phone down. Hargreaves was back inside now, sitting by the window, watching the street with the focused, slightly disbelieving attention of a man relearning the ordinary world. She went and sat beside him. Outside, the town of Marten went about its afternoon, indifferent and ordinary and entirely itself, the sky above it wide and grey and full of the cold light that comes when the cloud is thick but the day is long enough to push through it. It was the most beautiful thing she had seen in thirty-three days. She sat with Hargreaves in the light of it and was very glad.