Fredric Brown: Come and Go Mad

He had known it, somehow, when he had awakened that morning. I to knew it more surely now, staring out of the editorial room window into the early afternoon sunlight slanting down among the buildings to cast a pattern of light and shadow. He knew that soon, perhaps even today, something important was going to happen. Whether good or bad he did not know, but he darkly suspected. And with reason; there are few good things that may unexpectedly happen to a man, things, that is, of lasting importance. Disaster can strike from innumerable directions, in amazingly diverse ways.

A voice said, “Hey, Mr. Vine,” and he turned away from the window, slowly. That in itself was strange for it was not his manner to move slowly; he was a small, volatile man, almost cat-like in the quickness of his reactions and his movements.

But this time something made him turn slowly from the window, almost as though he never again expected to see that chiaroscuro of an early afternoon.

He said, “Hi, Red.”

The freckled copy boy said, “His Nibs wants to see ya.”

“Now?”

“Naw. Atcher convenience. Sometime next week, maybe. If yer busy, give him an apperntment.” He put his fist against Red’s chin and shoved, and the copy boy staggerd back in assumed distress.

He got up out of his chair and went over to the water cooler. He pressed his thumb on the button and water gurgled into the paper cup.

Harry Wheeler sauntered over and said, “Hiya, Nappy. What’s up? Going on the carpet?”

He said, “Sure, for a raise.”

He drank and crumpled the cup, tossing it into the waste basket. He went over to the door marked Private and went through it.

Walter J. Candler, the managing editor, looked up from the work on his desk and said affably, “Sit down, Vine. Be with you in a moment,” and then looked down again.

He slid into the chair opposite Candler, worried a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lighted it. He studied the back of the sheet of paper of which the managing editor was reading the front. There wasn’t anything on the back of it.

The M. E. put the paper down and looked at him. ”

Vine, I’ve got a screwy one. You’re good on screwy ones.”

He grinned slowly at the M. E. He said, “If that’s a compliment, thanks.”

“It s a compliment, all right. You’ve done some pretty tough things for us. This one’s different. I’ve never yet asked a reporter to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. I wouldn’t do this, so I’m not asking you to.”

The M. E. picked up the paper he’d been reading and then put it down again without even looking at it. “Ever hear of Ellsworth Joyce Randolph?”

“Head of the asylum? Hell yes, I’ve met him. Casually.”

“How’d he impress you?”

He was aware that the managing editor was staring at him intently, that it wasn’t too casual a question. He parried. “What do you mean: In what way? You mean is he a good Joe, is he a good politician, has he got a good bedside manner for a psychiatrist, or what?”

“I mean, how sane do you think he is?”

He looked at Candler and Candler wasn’t kidding. Candler was strictly deadpan.

He began to laugh, and then he stopped laughing. He leaned forward across Candler’s desk. “Ellsworth Joyce Randolph,” he said. “You’re talking about Ellsworth Joyce Randolph?”

Candler nodded. “Dr. Randolph was in here this morning. He told a rather strange story. He didn’t want me to print it. He did want me to check on it, to send our best man to check on it. He said if we found it was true we could print it in hundred and twenty line type in red ink.” Candler grinned wryly. “We could, at that.”

He stumped out his cigarette and studied Candler’s face. “But the story itself is so screwy you’re not sure whether Dr. Randolph himself might be insane?”

“Exactly.”

“And what’s tough about the assignment?”

“The doc says a reporter could get the story only from the inside.”

“You mean, go in as a guard or something?” Candler said, “Something.”

“Oh.”

He got up out of the chair and walked over to the window, stood with his back to the managing editor, looking out. The sun had moved hardly at all. Yet the shadow pattern in the streets looked different, obscurely different. The shadow pattern inside himself was different, too. This, he knew, was what had been going to happen. He turned around. He said, “No, Hell no.”

Candler shrugged imperceptibly. “Don’t blame you. I haven’t even asked you to. I wouldn’t do it myself.”

He asked, “What does Ellsworth Joyce Randolph think is going on inside his nuthouse? It must be something pretty screwy if it made you wonder whether Randolph himself is sane.”

“I can’t tell you that, Vine. Promised him I wouldn’t, whether or not you took the assignment.”

“You mean—even if I took the job I still wouldn’t know what I was looking for?”

“That’s right. You’d be prejudiced. You wouldn’t be objective. You’d be looking for something, and you might think you found it whether it was there or not. Or you might be so prejudiced against finding it that you’d refuse to recognize it if it bit you in the leg.”

He strode from the window over to the desk and banged his fist down on it.

He said, “God damn it, Candler, why me? You know what happened to me three years ago.”

“Sure. Amnesia.”

“Sure, amnesia. Just like that. But I haven’t kept it any secret that I never got over that amnesia. I’m thirty years old—or am I? My memory goes back three years. Do you know what it feels like to have a blank wall in your memory only three years back?

“Oh sure, I know what’s on the other side of that wall. I know because everybody tells me. I know I started here as a copy boy ten years ago. I know where I was born and when and I know my parents are both dead. I know what they look like—because I’ve seen their pictures. I know I didn’t have a wife and kids, because everybody who knew me told me I didn’t. Get that part everybody who knew me, not everybody I knew. I didn’t know anybody.

“Sure, I’ve done all right since then. After I got out of the hospital—and I don’t even remember the accident that put me there—I did all right back here because I still knew how to write news stories, even though I had to learn everybody’s name all over again. I wasn’t any worse off than a new reporter starting cold on a paper in a strange city. And everybody was as helpful as hell.”

Candler raised a placating hand to stem the tide. He said, “Okay, Nappy. You said no, and that’s enough. I don’t see what all that’s got to do with this story, but all you had to do was say’ no. So forget about it.”

The tenseness hadn’t gone out of him. He said, “You don’t see what that’s got to do with the story? You ask—or, all right, you don’t ask, you suggest—that I get myself certified as a madman, go into an asylum as a patient.

When—how much confidence does anyone have in his own mind when he can’t remember going to school, can’t remember the first time he met any of the people he works with every day, can’t remember starting on the job he works at, can’t remember anything back of three years before?”

Abruptly he struck the desk again with his fist, and then looked foolish about it. He said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get wound up about it like that.”

Candler said, “Sit down.”

“The answer’s still no.”

“Sit down, anyway.”

He sat down and fumbled a cigarette out of his pocket, got it lighted.

Candler said, “I didn’t even mean to mention it, but I’ve got to now. Now that you talked that way. I didn’t know you felt like that about your amnesia. I thought that was water under the bridge.