Dennis Lehane - Shutter Island

After a while, Chuck said, “At least it was for the right reason. You ever look at some of these poor bastards come back from Korea? They still don’t know why they were there. We stopped Adolf. We saved millions of lives. Right? We did something, Teddy.”

“Yeah, we did,” Teddy admitted. “Sometimes that’s enough.”

“It’s gotta be. Right?”

An entire tree swept past the door, upside down, its roots sprouting upward like horns.

“You see that?”

“Yeah. It’s gonna wake up in the middle of the ocean, say, ‘Wait a second . This isn’t right.’

“‘I’m supposed to be over there.’

“‘Took me years to get that hill looking the way I wanted it.’”

They laughed softly in the dark and watched the island race by like a fever dream.

“So how much do you really know about this place, boss?”

Teddy shrugged. “I know some. Not nearly enough. Enough to scare me.”

“Oh, great. You’re scared. What’s normal mortal supposed to feel, then?”

Teddy smiled. “Abject terror?”

“Okay. Consider me terrified.”

“It’s known as an experimental facility. I told you—radical therapy. Its funding comes partially from the Commonwealth, partially from the Bureau of Federal Penitentiaries, but mostly from a fund set up in ’fifty-one by HUAC.”

“Oh,” Chuck said. “Terrific. Fighting the Commies from an island in Boston Harbor. How does one go about doing that?”

“They experiment on the mind. That’s my guess. Write down what they know, turn it over to Cawley’s old OSS buddies in the CIA maybe. I dunno. You ever heard of phencyclidine?”

Chuck shook his head.

“LSD? Mescaline?”

“Nope and nope.”

“They’re hallucinogens,” Teddy said. “Drugs that cause you to hallucinate.”

“All right.”

“In even minimal doses, strictly sane people—you or I—would start seeing things.”

“Upside-down trees flying past our door?”

“Ah, there’s the rub. If we’re both seeing it, it’s not a hallucination. Everyone sees different things. Say you looked down right now and your arms had turned to cobras and the cobras were rising up, opening their jaws to eat your head?”

“I’d say that would be a hell of a bad day.”

“Or those raindrops turned into flames? A bush became a charging tiger?”

“An even worse day. I should’ve never left the bed. But, hey, you’re saying a drug could make you think shit like that was really happening?”

“Not just ‘could.’ Will. Given the right dosage, you will start to hallucinate.”

“Those are some drugs.”

“Yeah, they are. A lot of these drugs? Their effect is supposedly identical to what it’s like to be a severe schizophrenic. What’s his name, Ken, that guy. The cold in his feet. He believes that. Leonora Grant, she wasn’t seeing you. She was seeing Douglas Fairbanks.”

“Don’t forget—Charlie Chaplin too, my friend.”

“I’d do an imitation, but I don’t know what he sounds like.”

“Hey, not bad, boss. You can open for me in the Catskills.”

“There have been documented cases of schizophrenics tearing their own faces off because they believed their hands were something else, animals or whatever. They see things that aren’t there, hear voices no one else hears, jump from perfectly sound roofs because they think the building’s on fire, and on and on. Hallucinogens cause similar delusions.”

Chuck pointed a finger at Teddy. “You’re suddenly speaking with a lot more erudition than usual.”

Teddy said, “What can I tell you? I did some homework. Chuck, what do you think would happen if you gave hallucinogens to people with extreme schizophrenia?”

“No one would do that.”

“They do it, and it’s legal. Only humans get schizophrenia. It doesn’t happen to rats or rabbits or cows. So how are you going to test cures for it?”

“On humans.”

“Give that man a cigar.”

“A cigar that’s just a cigar, though, right?”

Teddy said, “If you like.”

Chuck stood and placed his hands on the stone slab, looked out at the storm. “So they’re giving schizophrenics drugs that make them even more schizophrenic?”

“That’s one test group.”

“What’s another?”

“People who don’t have schizophrenia are given hallucinogens to see how their brains react.”

“Bullshit.”

“This is a matter of public record, buddy. Attend a psychiatrists’ convention someday. I have.”

“But you said it’s legal.”

“It’s legal,” Teddy said. “So was eugenics research.”

“But if it’s legal, we can’t do anything about it.”

Teddy leaned into the slab. “No argument. I’m not here to arrest anyone just yet. I was sent to gather information. That’s all.”

“Wait a minute—sent? Christ, Teddy, how fucking deep are we here?”

Teddy sighed, looked over at him. “Deep.”

“Back up.” Chuck held up a hand. “From the top. How’d you get involved in all this?”

“It started with Laeddis. A year ago,” Teddy said. “I went to Shattuck under the pretense of wanting to interview him. I made up a bullshit story about how a known associate of his was wanted on a federal warrant and I thought Laeddis could shed some light on his whereabouts. Thing was, Laeddis wasn’t there. He’d been transferred to Ashecliffe. I call over here, but they claim to have no record of him.”

“And?”

“And that gets me curious. I make some phone calls to some of the psych hospitals in town and everyone is aware of Ashecliffe but no one wants to talk about it. I talk to the warden at Renton Hospital for the Criminally Insane. I’d met him a couple times before and I say, ‘Bobby, what’s the big deal? It’s a hospital and it’s a prison, no different from your place,’ and he shakes his head. He says, ‘Teddy, that place is something else entirely. Something classified. Black bag. Don’t go out there.’”

“But you do,” Chuck said. “And I get assigned to go with you.”

“That wasn’t part of the plan,” Teddy said. “Agent in charge tells me I have to take a partner, I take a partner.”

“So you’ve just been waiting for an excuse to come out here?”

“Pretty much,” Teddy said. “And, hell, I couldn’t bet it would ever happen. I mean, even if there was a patient break, I didn’t know if I’d be in town when it happened. Or if someone else would be assigned to it. Or, hell, a million ‘ifs.’ I got lucky.”

“Lucky? Fuck.”

“What?”

“It’s not luck, boss. Luck doesn’t work that way. The world doesn’t work that way. You think you just happened to get assigned to this detail?”

“Sure. Sounds a little crazy, but—”

“When you first called Ashecliffe about Laeddis, did you ID yourself?”

“Of course.”

“Well then—”

“Chuck, it was a full year ago.”

“So? You don’t think they keep tabs? Particularly in the case of a patient they claim to have no record of?”

“Again—twelve months ago.”

“Teddy, Jesus.” Chuck lowered his voice, placed the flats of his palms on the slab, took a long breath. “Let’s say they are doing some bad shit here. What if they’ve been onto you since before you ever stepped foot on this island? What if they brought you here?”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“Bullshit? Where’s Rachel Solando? Where’s one shred of evidence that she ever existed? We’ve been shown a picture of a woman and a file anyone could have fabricated.”

“But, Chuck—even if they made her up, even if they staged this whole thing, there’s still no way they could have predicted that I would be assigned to the case.”