Shutter Island

by Dennis Lehane

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me, in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

If time for me really is a series of bookmarks, then I feel as if someone has shaken the book and those yellowed slips of paper, torn matchbook covers and flattened coffee stirrers have fallen to the floor, and the dog-eared flaps have been pressed smooth.

“With the leaps—and there are leaps going on, don’t kid yourself, leaps every day—happening in the field of mental health, a place like this will cease to exist. Barbaric they’ll call it twenty years from now. An unfortunate by-product of the bygone Victorian influence. And go it should, they’ll say. Incorporation, they’ll say. Incorporation will be the order of the day. You are all welcomed into the fold. We will soothe you. Rebuild you. We are all General Marshalls. We are a new society, and there is no place for exclusion. No Elbas.”

“But do we lose our past to assure our future?”

This was a cruel trick of the mind, yes, but Teddy had long ago accepted the logic of it—waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without a history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.

The idea is to obfuscate. Confuse the listener until they believe out of exhaustion more than any sense of truth.

If you believe, gentlemen, that you are the sole holder of truth, then everyone else must be lying. And if everyone is lying…” “Then any truth they say,” Chuck said, “must be a lie.”

We were supposed to grow old together, Dolores. Have kids. Take walks under old trees. I wanted to watch the lines etch themselves into your flesh and know when each and every one of them appeared. Die together.

“A drug has just been approved—lithium is its name—that relaxes psychotic patients, tames them, some would say. Manacles will become a thing of the past. Chains, handcuffs. Bars even, or so the optimists say. The old school, of course, argues that nothing will replace psychosurgery, but the new school is stronger, I think, and it will have money behind it.”

If we’re both seeing it, it’s not a hallucination.

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?”

“God gives us earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes. He gives us mountains that spew fire onto our heads. Oceans that swallow ships. He gives us nature, and nature is a smiling killer. He gives us disease so that in our death we believe He gave us orifices only so that we could feel our life bleed out of them. He gave us lust and fury and greed and our filthy hearts. So that we could wage violence in His honor. There is no moral order as pure as this storm we’ve just seen. There is no moral order at all. There is only this—can my violence conquer yours?”