Chapter

1

“Nurse, nurse! You promised, God damn it! Get them out of my box! This is my box. MY BOX!” Such was the echo that reflected off the walls and barred windows.

Dr. Pressman stayed to the rear of the group as they moved toward the sound. In all the time he’d been administrating Milton State Institution, he’d never changed his habit of letting the other psychiatrists lead the way. The reason continued to elude his analytical mind.

Twenty-five years earlier, before being allowed to practice, the psychiatrist who analyzed him brought it to his attention. He could still hear the doctor’s voice telling him that he needed to find and deal with the guilt he was harboring or he would never break away from his unwillingness to assert.

Many patients later, he was now known as an innovative pioneer in psychiatry, an identity that colleagues across the country revered and envied. The fact that he hadn’t yet exorcised the guilt he was supposed to be carrying hadn’t caused any lack of assertiveness. For the past fifteen years as chief administrator of the institution, he hadn’t suffered anymore from his neurosis than the other doctors from theirs. He just thought theirs were sexier and received more attention from the women. Females didn’t pay much attention to him, except his secretary and wife. His secretary had given him five years of duty… his wife, twenty years of devotion. He preferred to walk behind them as well.

As the group of doctors shuffled in front of him through the newly painted hallway, he breathed deeply. The smell and look of clean walls was something he was particular about. A new coat of white every four months. His battle with the budget committee had become the in-joke of the institution. In spite of the perennial resistance, he had always been able to manipulate the yearly budget to accommodate white, white and white, three times a year.

It was with particular pride that Dr. Pressman maintained the state’s twenty acres, a bequeathed gift offered years earlier from a prominent state legislator. Sometimes, like this morning, he wondered why with all the sanitized insulation around him, he still walked the sun-drenched hallways with apprehension. He had told himself many times that these feelings were just a manufactured anxiety, for he knew the main building and its three annex structures offered ideal comfort for everyone else, both patient and staff. The classic colonial design was a rarity for state institutions. Unlike most in the country, the patients here were surrounded with the beautiful and simple, without any suggestion of the dank, gray cliché image. Perfectly groomed grounds and sycamore trees served to frame the unique security Milton offered to everyone. No, all was as Mr. Milton had left it. It was as if it had never changed hands. The birds sang each morning. The bakery in annex three shared early morning aromas through the open windows of the main building, often sending both patient and doctor into hunger pains. And most important, the endless California sun rose each day and filled the southern storybook setting with hope.

As the doctors arrived at Ward C, white walls, singing birds and sunshine seemed to disappear. Here the cacophony of drug-induced utterances mixed with incoherent outcries always served as a gentle reminder of the primary reasons for their many years of study and painful practice. Here the doctors felt their responsibility most. Here were the lost, the uncontrollable, the “fucking animals” as many of the muscular attendants addressed them at staff meetings. It was this twisted human element in Ward C that made enduring days at Milton difficult for Dr. Pressman. The pressure sometimes made him think he was one of them himself...just waiting to happen.

Fortunately, he was the only one aware of his fear, with the possible exception of the man whose voice he now heard. The voice was all too familiar. It was the sound of perhaps the most perceptive personality he had ever encountered. He’d spent months with the man and his voice, and he didn’t want to hear it right now, especially as he passed an open window. It was croissant day—his favorite. He wanted to linger with the aroma trailing up from the bakery, but he was head of the facility. The voice coming from Cell 7 reminded him he had little time for his own vulnerabilities.

“This is my box. MY BOX!” The scream was typical of someone on this floor. The doctors paused and looked to Dr. Pressman for the nod that confirmed they had arrived at the right stop.

The group paused a few moments as they passed the small, barred window of Cell 7.  Charlton Mathews, the gaunt man lying fetal position on the floor—a very clean, sterile floor—was having another one of his image battles, images of voices without faces, images that were not welcome in “his box.” The “holographic visits” as he called them had become commonplace since his arrival. Slipping into the altered dimension had become routine day and night. He continued to mutter in an almost child-like voice, “my box, this is my box.... “ Dr. Pressman peered through the window. His thoughts were unlike the others. He knew a great deal about the “box.” He just didn’t have the complete answer yet, or as he had learned over the years, his complete opinion yet.

The doctors moved on to Cell 4. There, Charles, a much calmer man, a much younger man sat on his chair staring out the window at the manicured grounds surrounding the institution. He could hear the doctors muttering among themselves as they paused a moment. He remembered Dr. Pressman had told him the tape review and study would be conducted in the conference room, starting today.

The doctors moved on through the halls and up the stairway toward one of the gleaming white conference rooms. They were about to hear Charles’s taped journal, his own version of what had happened, a version contained in a carton of audiotapes that had been ruled inadmissible as evidence. They had a heavy task ahead of them. Most would have preferred to be somewhere else on that July afternoon, especially had they known what they would shortly learn about Mathews and Charles, the two men whose lives they held in their hands.

Charles wasn’t the kind of person anyone would pay much attention to. He was in his late twenties when he met Mathews. Now, several months, and what felt like numerous lifetimes later, both of them were exhausted and looked ten years older than their age. To look at them side by side, one would definitely think water and oil. And yet, the minds, the souls of these two men had journeyed so closely with one another for the previous few months that each had become like the other...even hearing the same inner voices.

Once an eminent psychiatrist, Charlton Mathews was having a difficult time. His aging beard had now grown scraggly. Feeling boxed in by voices was a new experience for him. It hadn’t been that long ago when his talent was highly respected. Now at 55, heavy brows all but obscured his once brilliant and sensitive eyes. Compared to the alert, clean-shaven, muscular young body of his former patient Charles, Mathews was a wreck. Though they were both getting some respite from the obsession that had consumed them, they both would have preferred a different kind of rest. For now, however, Ward C, Cells 4 and 7 would continue to be their partial escape from thinking, since thinking was the last thing either of them needed—at least for a while.

Their skewed thinking had created two potential wards of the state. The authorities might soon be escorting them both to an upstate institution, depending on the content of the tapes that was about to be played for some of the country’s most respected doctors and analysts. The two men had been charged with murder; they would have to wait and hope the tapes would help get them acquitted. The defense attorneys knew that without a successful insanity plea, a guilty verdict would make life imprisonment or the death penalty inevitable; they too would have to be patient. During this pre-trial period, the doctors would determine their sanity and ability to stand trial. No one knew how long it would take.