Dennis Lehane - Shutter Island

Teddy shrugged.

“Said you were in the Ardennes and part of the liberating force at Dachau.”

Another shrug.

“And then your wife is killed? How much violence, Marshal, do you think a man can carry before it breaks him?”

Teddy said, “Don’t know, Doc. Kind of wondering, myself.”

Cawley leaned across the space between them and clapped Teddy on the knee. “Take those names from me before you leave. Okay? I’d like to be sitting here five years from now, Marshal, and know you’re still in the world.”

Teddy looked down at the hand on his knee. Looked up at Cawley.

“I would too,” he said softly.

HE MET BACK up with Chuck in the basement of the men’s dormitory, where they’d assembled cots for everyone while they rode out the storm. To get here, Teddy had come through a series of underground corridors that connected all the buildings in the compound. He’d been led by an orderly named Ben, a hulking mountain of jiggling white flesh, through four locked gates and three manned checkpoints, and from down here you couldn’t even tell the world stormed above. The corridors were long and gray and dimly lit, and Teddy wasn’t all that fond of how similar they were to the corridor in his dream. Not nearly as long, not filled with sudden banks of darkness, but ball-bearing gray and cold just the same.

He felt embarrassed to see Chuck. He’d never had a migraine attack that severe in public before, and it filled him with shame to remember vomiting on the floor. How helpless he’d been, like a baby, needing to be lifted from the chair.

But as Chuck called, “Hey, boss!” from the other side of the room, it surprised him to realize what a relief it was to be reunited with him. He’d asked to go on this investigation alone and been declined. At the time, it had pissed him off, but now, after two days in this place, after the mausoleum and Rachel’s breath in his mouth and those fucking dreams, he had to admit he was glad not to be alone on this.

They shook hands and he remembered what Chuck had said to him in the dream—"I’m never getting off this island"—and Teddy felt a sparrow’s ghost pass through the center of his chest and flap its wings.

“How you doing, boss?” Chuck clapped his shoulder.

Teddy gave him a sheepish grin. “I’m better. A little shaky, but all in all, okay.”

“Fuck,” Chuck said, lowering his voice and stepping away from two orderlies smoking cigarettes against a support column. “You had me scared, boss. I thought you were having a heart attack or a stroke or something.”

“Just a migraine.”

“Just,” Chuck said. He lowered his voice even further and they walked to the beige cement wall on the south side of the room, away from the other men. “I thought you were faking it at first, you know, like you had some plan to get to the files or something.”

“I wish I was that smart.”

He looked in Teddy’s eyes, his own glimmering, pushing forward. “It got me thinking, though.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did.”

“What’d you do?”

“I told Cawley I’d sit with you. And I did. And after a while, he got a call and he left the office.”

“You went after his files?”

Chuck nodded.

“What did you find?”

Chuck’s face dropped. “Well, not much actually. I couldn’t get into the file cabinets. He had some locks I’ve never seen before. And I’ve picked a lot of locks. I could’ve picked these, but I would have left marks. You know?”

Teddy nodded. “You did the right thing.”

“Yeah, well…” Chuck nodded at a passing orderly and Teddy had the surreal sensation that they’d been transported into an old Cagney movie, cons on the yard plotting their escape. “I did get into his desk.”

“You what?”

Chuck said, “Crazy, huh? You can slap my wrist later.”

“Slap your wrist? Give you a medal.”

“No medal. I didn’t find much, boss. Just his calendar. Here’s the thing, though—yesterday, today, tomorrow, and the next day were all blocked off, you know? He bordered them in black.”

“The hurricane,” Teddy said. “He’d heard it was coming.”

Chuck shook his head. “He wrote across the four boxes. You know what I mean? Like you’d write ‘Vacation on Cape Cod.’ Following me?”

Teddy said, “Sure.”

Trey Washington ambled on over to them, a ratty stogie in his mouth, his head and clothes drenched with rain. “Ya’ll getting clandestine over here, Marshals?”

“You bet,” Chuck said.

“You been out there?” Teddy said.

“Oh, yeah. Brutal now, Marshals. We were sandbagging the whole compound, boarding up all the windows. Shit. Motherfuckers falling all over themselves out there.” Trey relit his cigar with a Zippo and turned to Teddy. “You okay, Marshal? Word around the campfire was you had some sort of attack.”

“What sort of attack?”

“Oh, now, you’d be here all night, you tried to get every version of the story.”

Teddy smiled. “I get migraines. Bad ones.”

“Had an aunt used to get ’em something awful. Lock herself up in a bedroom, shut off the light, pull the shades, you wouldn’t see her for twenty-four hours.”

“She’s got my sympathy.”

Trey puffed his cigar. “Well, she long dead and all now, but I’ll pass it upstairs in my prayers tonight. She was a mean woman anyway, headache or not. Used to beat me and my brother with a hickory stick. Sometimes for nothing. I’d say, ‘Auntie, what I do?’ She say, ‘I don’t know, but you thinking about doing something terrible.’ What you do with a woman like that?”

He truly seemed to be waiting for an answer, so Chuck said, “Run faster.”

Trey let out a low “Heh, heh, heh” around his cigar. “Ain’t that the truth. Yes, sir.” He sighed. “I’m gone go dry off. We’ll see you later.”

“See you.”

The room was filling up with men coming in from the storm, shaking the moisture off black slickers and black forest ranger hats, coughing, smoking, passing around the not-so-secret flasks.

Teddy and Chuck leaned against the beige wall and spoke in flat tones while facing the room.

“So the words on the calendar…”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t say ‘Vacation on Cape Cod.’”

“Nope.”

“What’d they say?”

“’Patient sixty-seven.’”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s enough, though, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. I’d say so.”

HE COULDN’T SLEEP. He listened to the men snore and huff and inhale and exhale, some with faint whistles, and he heard some talk in their sleep, heard one say, “You shoulda told me. That’s all. Just said the words…” Heard another say, “I got popcorn in my throat.” Some kicked the sheets and some rolled over and back again and some rose long enough to slap their pillows before dropping back to the mattresses. After a while, the noise achieved a kind of comfortable rhythm that reminded Teddy of a muffled hymn.

The outside was muffled too, but Teddy could hear the storm scrabble along the ground and thump against the foundation, and he wished there were windows down here, if only so he could see the flash of it, the weird light it must be painting on the sky.

He thought of what Cawley had said to him.

It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.

Was he suicidal?

He supposed he was. He couldn’t remember a day since Dolores’s death when he hadn’t thought of joining her, and it sometimes went further than that. Sometimes he felt as if continuing to live was an act of cowardice. What was the point of buying groceries, of filling the Chrysler tank, of shaving, putting on socks, standing in yet another line, picking a tie, ironing a shirt, washing his face, combing his hair, cashing a check, renewing his license, reading the paper, taking a piss, eating—alone, always alone—going to a movie, buying a record, paying bills, shaving again, washing again, sleeping again, waking up again…