Day 74 - Darwin's Game - Chapter 23 (4402 words)

©Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

DARWIN'S GAME

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 23

Working in a mental institution was dull with periods of uninteresting chaos. Eugene Manson was an orderly and the Russell-Watts Secure Mental Care Facility in Marquette Michigan and he enjoyed being employed, liking the stability of his job. It was predictable, reliable and he was paid well enough that he would not consider going anywhere else. The place was a cold and inhospitable castle like building that matched the occasionally austere winters. If he would have described the building he worked at to anyone, it would have been a stretch for him to find a good analogy.

It was European influenced and had that grand French or Austrian façade, but inside it could have been a fifties style cold and sterile public hospital in one wing, traversing a corridor would take you to an English country manor style, and the administration centre had its own oval office in the centre. His favourite way of describing it to friends was it was as schizophrenic as the people who were captured in it's walls.

Captivity was a good word for it, because it was a secure facility in one of the larger wings and they had a certain number of very dangerous patients locked up there who would never see freedom again. There was treatment and care taking place as well as pure incarceration, but it was well known that few of them would ever be 'better' people, no matter how cauterised their mental wounds, no matter much treatment was applied, there was such a thing as incurably bad.

The facility itself was along the coast line, set into a small forest peninsula along the coast from the city of Marquette itself and had a sweeping view of Lake Superior from most of the outward facing rooms and offices. The secure wing was in the centre of the U-Shaped hub where the other care centres were housed and had the advantage of being set in this old but incredibly sturdy building, reinforced and built to last over a century before. The facility was a stepping stone hospital for doctors and nurses as they took their training in the university town before moving on to bigger and better things. There was a high turnover in trained medical personnel and because of this the management put great care into finding local long term staff and keeping them happy, well paid and being the backbone of the hospital when new people bounced through.

Eugene had a moderate education, he was far from stupid but he never had any patience or discipline for study beyond high school. He had drifted about for a year or two travelling America, looking for something but not really finding it and wondering what to do with his life. He never intended to return to Michigan, not that he hated it there, he didn't even mind the weather and the constant lack of warmth having grown up with it. He had assumed that California would be a welcome respite as the climatic opposition to Marquette, but had found the heat oppressive and he wandered to other areas, further north looking for something more his style and speed.

He had been happy in Portland and was considering staying there, or moving to the nearby Eugene, just for the namesake novelty alone when his father died, unexpectedly and he came back home to help his mother settle his affairs and restart after the loss. The hole it left in her life and in her directly, was too much for her to handle and it was apparent to Eugene that he would be living back home for a while, possibly for the rest of his life.

This fact was not depressing to him but comforting in more of a way than he had expected. Now he had a short term purpose he had to construct a life, a living and a means to get his own and his mother's life back to some sense of normalcy. This meant that not just earning a wage, but finding a place in the society of his home town. He had friends he fell back in with easily enough, and knew his way around because he had only been gone a few years. He had assumed to never return except for visits so a lot of the experiences he had taken for granted were close to becoming new for him. Once let go, the distance between your memory and your experience widens and to Eugene it was not a homecoming, it was an introduction.

He shortened his name to Gene because it was a new life and new city for him, so a new Eugene was in order. His friends took to the name change and his mother, well she had called him Gene and even Genie when he was a child, it was reassuring to her to have a child to look after again, even if it were the opposite that was true. A week after the funeral took an afternoon to go and convince the place where his mother was working as an office administrator that she was just upset and distraught but was coming back to work, soon. She had been gone for coming up to three weeks and was in tears most days, she was not ready to go and spoke to Gene about quitting and doing, well nothing as she had no plan only grief.

His mother Caroline was employed at the Russell-Watts hospital, and her manager was a very kind and understanding widower himself who showed the appropriate level of concern, the firm but polite request for a return date within reason and asked the obvious questions about her future state of mind. They agreed on another week before Caroline would come back, part time until she could find her feet without her husband around. The sudden departure was due to a heart attack, it was unpredictable, he had been healthy, happy and full of life until his chest imploded one day, while driving to work. He drove the car to the shoulder before passing out, and in the few minutes before someone stopped to check on him, he passed away. He never turned up to work, they called his cell phone to get no response and eventually called his home number. Caroline assumed that he was having car trouble so she also tried his cell phone, but this time there was someone answering it and it was not her husband but one of the EMT's called in.

Gene explained all this to her manager and elicited the usual come back of shock and empathy, made more poignant by his own experiences with the slower death of his own wife to cancer a few years earlier. He had recalled the support and attention from Caroline and her husband at the time, and the karmic circle of paying back the kindness only helped her smooth through the impact of not doing her job for a month, one that not many others understood and they sorely missed her expertise and knowledge of.

Gene was almost out of the main foyer when he heard his name being called out across the marble floor, echoing hollow and thin in the large open space. He closed the main door, feeling that warmth closing off the snow breeze from winter outside. His mother's boss was talking very fast and handing him some papers to take home and read up on. Gene was looking for a job and had mentioned that only in passing when referring to the list of things he was doing to get his mother stabilised and back to a steady routine again. That comment had fired off a note in the back part of the boss's brain and it was after Gene had gone that he recalled that they had three vacancies that Gene would be suited for, not medical, training provided and suitable for a man who was strong enough and wanted a steady reliable job.

There was a condition though, they already had an orderly named Gene, so could they call him Eugene? Would that be a big imposition for him? Eugene had come full circle to Gene and Eugene in a month and he was back home, in a new life, new job and new city, with all the old things clicking into place around him. If he stopped to analyse it, he would laugh. He and the other Gene would get together for drinks and the occasional recreational drug taking, nothing too heavy, and it always coincided with something manic or dramatic at work. These sessions were laughingly named 'Gene Therapy', they were a cornerstone in his social circles very soon, even when there was only one Gene left.

That had been over five years now and he was as much a staple part of Russell-Watts as his mother Caroline was. The other “Gene” had left the hospital and moved states to a warmer climate, much like his friend Eugene had once done. Now that there was only one, he still kept his full name, not bothering with the need for a new identity, that he was who he was regardless of the name attached.

He did not love the job part of his job, it was a necessity but it yielded a camaraderie with his fellow workers that he had not had before. It was very much a case of 'Us' vs 'Them' most of the time and the harder the patient the more the bond between the staff was. There was bitching and the usual frictions between people, but there was that clear line of a soldier's job, the enemy was the enemy and friendly fire was in no one's interest. Not that it did not happen, but it was never ill intentioned or deliberate. Eugene was definitely one of “us” for everyone at Russell-Watts.

He had a senior level pay grade, the management wanted to keep him happy and employed, the anchor for the newer staff and the go-to for new nurses and doctors doing their rotations here. He moved to the secure incarceration wing after four years at Russell-Watts and that made him even more critical and made him more money again. His mother still worked in the office, but she had never come back to full time after the funeral. They had not struggled for money, but the insurance money that should have come from his fathers policy was held back, they felt like they would never see it. The company argued the meaning of the pre-existing condition, it turns out that while no one else had known, his father had been told that this heart was in dangerous shape. There was nothing to be done, and it had been discovered after the policy had been taken out, by at least twenty years, but he had know for at least twenty months before he died and did not declare it once.

Gene and Caroline fought and fought and grew tired, accepting the slow molasses like response of the insurance company as a slow defeat, inevitable and inexorable and impossible to fight. They signed nothing without the advice of their lawyer, but the funeral costs were covered but the remaining two hundred thousand dollar balance was nowhere near in sight. So they kept on the way things were, not struggling but barely above comfortable, able to keep the taxes and the utilities covered, thankful for the shrewd paying down of the mortgage on the family home.

Gene had a girlfriend in Portland, they kept a long distance relationship going for a while, visits were frequent to start with then less so as time wore on until they drifted to a gentle separation that ended with no closure, just a 'whenever' clause that satisfied them both. He started seeing a local girl, she was younger than him and was not interested the bright lights, big city syndrome that afflicted more and more of the Marquette girls, this was a place you came back to once you saw how bad other places were, not the place where you saw yourself staying forever, until you missed the waters. Penny was different, she was a homebody and just his type considering the life he had carved in the snow, the stability he craved and that she was attracted to. They had a small wedding but it was enough to put them into a little debt that they had to work their way out of. Then the car that he and his mother drove to work in broke down, and it was time to get a new one and his new wife got pregnant. All within a month of the wedding, the timing was far from perfect.

Eugene was stressed that day at work, he was tense and he let it show in front of the one patient he should not have, David Wilson. Wilson was a socio-path, a murderous and cruel patient who wore the staff down, and of all the people who handled him it was only Eugene who managed to keep his cool, keep him at arm's length and not show him the chinks in his armour. Important to interacting with him was to falsify your feelings, appear as socio-pathic to hurt and pain as he was inside, give him nothing to leverage on you. He always had an agenda and was always trying to find a way to manipulate his way through the staff and find a hole, one he could tear open to a possible exit or advantage. Eugene was calm, could talk endlessly about sports and town events while showing no real interest and no passion that could be exploited.

All day Wilson kept at him and hammered home the risks of debt, pregnancy complications, premature birth defects, congenital heart defects passed on genetically and a raft of things that Eugene had let slip to another staff member within unfortunate earshot of the secure wing's worst patient. He left work early, the blood pumping in his ears, the pressure rising behind his eyes, trying to bleed it all out before he got home to his mother, his wife and the home he now owed money on with a small but badly timed mortgage.

Dinner was quiet, they could see he was ill at ease with the world and he was best left to deal with it on his own terms. After dinner he went to the woods, his thinking spot where he could see the water of Lake Superior and it let him calm his nerves. His phone was streaming some music to his car stereo, the ethereal and otherworldly tones of Sigur Ros, the Icelandic band, were floating out of the open car door and covering him as he watched the dim light playing on the flat calm water of the bay where his headlights of cars driving a nearby bend played lightly on the surface. After an hour he cam back home, knew he could survive it all and could even handle the dreaded David Wilson once more.

The next day at work he did not see Wilson, he ignored the absence as good luck and went about his day. By the end he still had not seen him, and after the tension that had ratcheted between them the previous day, he was unsure if that was a good or a bad thing. He finally asked someone where he was and he got a smile in return. It happened that after he left Wilson had taken courage from his run in with the previously impervious Eugene Manson and had spent a few hours terrorising the patients and staff, causing a riot with him at the centre, but it had been clamped down on so fast because he had been closely watched. Closely watched because the Doctor on duty had seen the results of the tail end of Eugene's shift and decided enough was enough.

Eugene was taken to the crisis unit and there he was, so out of it that it barely looked like David Wilson through the fog of pills. He felt guilty for a few seconds that this was a consequence of this slip up, his inability to mange himself. There was a flicker of recognition in Wilson's eyes and a glimmer of a smile and then that split second evaporated any of the sympathy welling in Eugene right there and then.

They kept him on the medication, and a week later he was the same vegetative lump in the room as he had been the week before when Eugene checked up on him. This time there was no glint of recognition in his eyes, in fact Eugene had to come up closer and closer to see if it was really him. He went home, as troubled as he had been after the run in a week before, but this time he was unsettled because he was beginning to think that the man that looked somewhat like the terrible and deserving David Wilson was not David Wilson after all.

He went back again the next day, and the day after that to be sure. He was not the same man, he just did not look quite right. He could have been a brother or a cousin, and with the now rough facial hair framing his features it was getting harder to distinguish him from the real thing. He got Caroline to check the patient visitation records for the crisis unit, there were none except therapists and doctors doing the usual rounds. There were no exits and no entries unaccounted for, and still he felt like there was a miscarriage here somewhere.

He came to work early, to report what he thought, even if it meant risking his job and his reputation to claim that a man that was in a secure and tightly controlled environment and under extremely heavy medication had somehow managed to replace himself with a close approximate and escaped. The only real explanation was outside help, but who would want to unleash that monster on the world. He sat in his new car, still being paid off with the mortgage and tapped his fingers on the wheel deciding if it was worth it. He thought about the last encounter, and the ones that he had intervened in before that and drew the conclusion that he could not sit by, not to let him wreak a fresh havoc elsewhere.

He got out of the car and walked towards the main entrance, not noticing the man who exited a car nearby and walked alongside him.

“Eugene.” the man spoke matter of fact, and Manson turned to look at the non-descript man, unable to place him.

“Sorry do I know you?”

“No. Not yet anyway. Please have a seat.” The man indicated a park bench to the right of the entrance, and away from the line of sight of the security camera watching the main doors. They sat down and the mad folded his gloved hands and looked straight ahead and not at Eugene.

“I take it that you know.”

“Uhhh?”

“You know that it is not Wilson.”

“Fuck, I'm right? Wait! What the hell? Who...”

“Who is he? A very sick man, one who is no worse where he is now than where he was before. You needn't worry about him, he's better cared for here than where we got him from.”

“We?” Eugene was looking about and feeling surreptitiously in his pocket for his mobile phone, though he guessed he left it in the car in his haste to get his unpleasant task done, his routine upset.

“We, me, it is not relevant. What is relevant is that I need a favour from you. I don't want anyone to know that it's not who they think it is, not yet anyway.”

Eugene was stunned and a little dizzy, this was odd in the extreme, it felt like he was watching a film from the inside, like a distorted 'common man' who could see beyond the fourth wall and be in both worlds at the same time. He felt disoriented and confused.

“I... I...”

“It's confusing I know, and you need to know a few things so let me be clear, and it won't matter after that as I'll walk away and you will never see me again. I promise you that.” The man was not smiling, but his eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, he did not seem blind, but did not or could not look directly at Eugene, so he mostly saw profile and no clear picture of him head on.

“Ok. I guess, I can hear you out.” Eugene folded his arms and looked about, he was earlier than most in the shift crossover and it was cold outside so no one was around.

“David Wilson is a bad man, this you know. He is never not going to be bad, and he his here to avoid the more criminal incarceration that he would get in a real prison, where his advantages and freedoms would be curtailed even more, or worse he would be a more effective force for … well let's just call it evil shall we.”

Eugene nodded. “Yes, yes we can call it that.”

“So we, I, have him now and he will face a full accounting for his … I was going to say crimes but nature might be the best way to put it, you'll understand that soon enough. Either way he is not rescued, he has not escaped and the man inside is being cared for in a way that he had not before. Do you understand?”

“Not really, no.”

“Don't worry too much, it will become clear. What I need from you is silence, you need to not report what you know. For this you will be handsomely paid.”

Eugene thought about the money for a second before indignantly saying “I'm not for sale, if you think...”

The man held up a finger. “Sorry, my mistake you won't “will be” paid, you will “have been” paid. The money from your fathers insurance settlement has been released to your lawyer today, and the judge kindly added punitive costs to your claim. You are now financially secure.”

“What? Are you from them? What is that got to do with my father? What has Wilson got to do with anything?” he was more confused than before.

“No, nothing and nothing. The thing is I like you well enough, I have done my research and justice in your case is to get your mother's settlement. Justice in David Wilson's case is something else.”

“Justice? I don't understand.”

“No, you won't for a while. When you do you may be tempted to tell people about this conversation, but when the insurance people get wind of my interference with the payout settlement they will injunction it and you so it would vanish promptly. So think of your silence as less paid for and more secured by your own valid financial concern.”

Eugene stood up “Are you blackmailing me?”

The man stood up and waked away. Eugene ran after him and put a hand on his arm. “What the fuck is this all about and who the hell are you? Why are you doing this to me?”

The man still facing away, turned slightly to be seen in profile once more.

“This is about Justice, kind of. I'm helping you, and giving you yours because you deserve it and there is an unexpected weak link in my plan. Instead of threatening you to shore that up, because you are not a bad person at all, I have found a win/win solution to your continued silence.” He turned away once more and walked away, a few feet further he added.

“If you need a name? Call me Charles.”

That was the last he saw of Charles, and he went into work and started his shift early, did not finish early but on time. He did not check on Wilson, knowing what he did now and did not report him either. He went home and found his mother waiting for him with a letter and a cheque for a million dollars and tears in her eyes. His wife was beaming and the smile he forced out of his thoughts of guilt and complicity was genuine quickly.

When episode one aired the FBI swarmed through the facility and he kept his cool. No one pointed any fingers and no one asked him anything other than routine questions. Everyone knew about the settlement, it had made local news and it was a feel good story for a little guy beating the evil corporate. So when the Feds looked at the money trails of all the employees they found kickbacks and drug dealing, stolen merchandise and contraband a plenty, they did not look twice at the publicly disclosed and obviously well deserved insurance payout.

Each week they watched the new episode in the staff room together, downloading the unedited version each time and all the Russell-Watts staff followed Wilson carefully, seeing him sit back and evaluating the others, looking for pressure points and talking, the words unheard but the staff knew the tone of voice he would always use, and then when his luck ran out they saw him working overtime for the advantage that never came.

When it was all over for Wilson Eugene sat and stared at the screen for a few more minutes before commenting “That was just.” and no one blinked or disagreed. The man doped out to the eyeballs was a terminal brain cancer case, his mental faculties were gone even when the drugs were stopped and he was brought back to normal. He had no records in any system, had no fingerprints on any files and looked enough like David Wilson to pass for him. He died before the end of Darwin's Game, a John Doe.

Eugene and his wife had a son when the baby finally arrived and he did not think twice about naming the child Charles. Caroline approved immediately, as that was the nicest thing that her son could have done for her, naming his first born after her late husband Chuck Manson.