Shutter Island

by Dennis Lehane

Until that moment, he’d never known they were this alone.

Still, the captain had spoken highly of him, said everyone in town knew that he could do a day’s work. And wasn’t that the highest praise one could give a man?

“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.

He would prefer to do just about anything—swim in that water even—rather than speak of Dolores, of the facts of her being on this earth for thirty-one years and then ceasing to be.

Grief

What was far crueler were the ways in which a seemingly illogical list of objects could trigger memories of his wife that lodged in his brain like a lit match. He could never predict what one of the objects would be—

Grief

Migraines, his anyway, never visited during times of pressure or work, only afterward, when all had quieted down, after the shells stopped dropping, after the pursuit was ended.

The trick, Teddy had long since learned, was to stay busy and stay focused. They couldn’t catch you if you didn’t stop running.

Teddy shrugged. “The patients here, apparently, suffer a variety of delusions.”

He felt a sudden pity for all those people on the other side of the wall who recognized that thin wire for what it was, realized just how badly the world wanted to keep them in.

Admittance to Ward C is forbidden without the written consent and physical presence of both the warden and Dr. Cawley.

Teddy laughed, heard the sound of it carry off on the sweep of night air and dissolve in the distant surf, as if it had never been, as if the island and the sea and the salt took what you thought you had and…

“I’m not familiar with that term.” “Consider traveling more.”

Teddy could feel his exhaustion as a living, broken thing, a fourth body in the stairwell with them.

By the end of that day, we’d removed five hundred souls from the face of the earth. Murdered ’em all. No self-defense, no warfare came into it. It was homicide. And yet, there was no gray area. They deserved so much worse. So, fine—but how do you live with that? How do you tell the wife and the parents and the kids that you’ve done this thing? You’ve executed unarmed people? You’ve killed boys? Boys with guns and uniforms, but boys just the same? Answer is—You can’t tell ’em. They’ll never understand. Because what you did was for the right reason. But what you did was also wrong. And you’ll never wash it off.”

“It’s legal,” Teddy said. “So was eugenics research.”

“It’s going to be okay, partner.” “Marshals! Are you out here?” Chuck said, “I don’t know.” “I do,” Teddy said, though he didn’t.

Parallel to boat scene w his father

“Sixty-six patients,” Teddy said. “That suggests that the answer to ’Who is sixty-seven?’ is that there’s a sixty-seventh patient here.” Silence.

They were all dead, he realized, long dead and long gone. He was a ghost, come back through the centuries to his ghost town. It wasn’t here any longer. He wasn’t here any longer. There was no here.

You had to make tough decisions when you were an adult, decisions children couldn’t possibly understand. But you made them for the children.

Teddy could see the pain in his face, even after all these years, the stunned disbelief at being the butt of a cosmic joke.

Shared grief

“U.S. marshals don’t go to head doctors. Sorry. But if it ever leaked, I’d be pensioned out.”

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.

But to do that, he’d have to find a way to put Dolores on a shelf, to allow her to gather dust in the hope that enough dust would accumulate to soften his memory of her. Mute her image. Until one day she’d be less a person who had lived and more the dream of one.

The bigger the breakdown, then the bigger the destruction of self, then the more potent it becomes.

There was no simple answer for that. How did anyone know where faith developed? One moment, it wasn’t there, the next it was.

“You can’t kill Laeddis and expose the truth at the same time. You have to make a choice. You understand that, don’t you?”

she was so simply his love, his girl, watching him approach as if she were memorizing him and his walk and those flowers and this moment, and he wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you’d been born for only one moment, and this, for whatever reason, was it.

Hadn’t there been one blip in time when Chuck had been clumsy in his movements? Yes. Teddy was sure the moment had happened. But he couldn’t remember the specifics. Not right now. Not here.

Chuck pulled the paper free and Teddy could see him the day of their arrival handing over his gun to the guard in a fumble of motion, having trouble with the holster snap. Not something your average marshal had trouble with. Kind of thing, in point of fact, that got you killed on the job.

“I’ve built something valuable here. But valuable things also have a way of being misunderstood in their own time. Everyone wants a quick fix. We’re tired of being afraid, tired of being sad, tired of feeling overwhelmed, tired of feeling tired. We want the old days back, and we don’t even remember them, and we want to push into the future, paradoxically, at top speed. Patience and forbearance become the first casualties of progress. This is not news. Not news at all. It’s always been so.”

“Men who believe that the way to the mind is not by way of ice picks through the brain or large dosages of dangerous medicine but through an honest reckoning of the self.”

The pharmacists will take over, and it won’t be any less barbaric. It’ll just seem so. The same zombiefication and warehousing that are going on now will continue under a more publicly palatable veneer.

But someday, Marshal, and it’s not far off, we’ll medicate human experience right out of the human experience. Do you understand that?”