The Blind. A.F. Brady

and Horizon House, the halfway houses, but they didn’t have anything on him. The staff turnover at those places is ridiculous, and they don’t seem to keep proper records.” She’s reaching around her desk and pulling at scraps of paper poking out of various in-boxes and out-boxes. She’s looking for something.

      “Have you had patients like this before? I’m not entirely sure how best to proceed. He’s a giant question mark, like you said, so I don’t know how to properly place him in groups, and I’m not sure how to draw out the information we need to help him.” Rachel loves it when I ask her for advice.

      “I’m looking for his original intake stuff. I gave him a blank sheet to write on when he refused to fill out the intake materials. I asked him about his goals for treatment and that kind of thing. I know he scribbled something down, but I can’t remember what it said.” She pushes her chair around the office, opening file drawers and checking inside a massive disorganized cabinet.

      “For now, I’m just going to keep up our weekly sessions,” I reassure her, “keep him in some of the high-functioning, intellectual groups, and see if we can get him comfortable with me, and maybe then he’ll come out of his shell.” Rachel doesn’t seem to be listening to me anymore as she’s seeking this document.

      “Here! Here it is,” she says, pulling a page with rolled corners from the back of a notebook. “See if this can be useful to you.”

      I take the page from her hands and look over Richard’s handwriting. He was using a dull pencil and the lines of his cursive are blurry and uneven. He made a heading that says “Goals at Typhlos” and he filled in the section with bullet points: “To get better. To forgive. To reenter life.” He specifically writes Typhlos in various places on the sheet. He obviously wanted to come here in particular. There are several other sections, but the pencil lines have been smeared and I can’t read much. Under another heading called “Therapy,” he wrote something that looks like open up and something else that looks like Samantha.

NOVEMBER 14TH, 12:34 P.M.

      It’s snowing outside. I’m up on the corner of my desk, staring out the window. The guys on the scaffold are still working, despite the change in weather. It’s been brutally cold, but for some reason, when the snow starts, it feels warmer. Like the snow is creating a blanket that covers the world and keeps it safe. The flakes are fat and wet and sticking to the cars parked on the street below. In the city, the snow only stays beautiful for a couple of hours. Once the plows come through, the perfect white shroud becomes a thick, gray sludge, sometimes piled to waist height. The only thing I miss about my house growing up is the way the snow stayed untouched.

      My door is slightly ajar, and I hear the chatter of patients in the hallway. My office is across from the computer room, a popular spot for patients to try to break into porn sites or gather to chat with each other. There are two dilapidated couches and someone is always asleep in there.

      I hear an unfamiliar voice outside my door, probably someone leaning against the wall outside the computer room. It’s a man’s voice, Brooklyn accent, and the hiss of missing teeth. His voice is loud and abrasive, but he hushes it down to a whisper scream to add a conspiratorial air to his story. I move to the crack in the door and listen to him without showing myself.

      “It’s women—women get you into these places, man. No matter what you do, you can’t please ’em.”

      “A woman got you in this place?” Another male voice I can’t quite recognize.

      “Yeah, she did. My ex.”

      “What did she do?” Whoever is telling this story is certainly commanding the attention of his listener.

      “Well, she broke up with me, first of all. Then she went and started fuckin’ my best friend. Mmm-hmm. And you know that ain’t right. So, I had no choice; I had to get her back. Ain’t nobody gonna disrespect me like that.”

      “How’d you do it? How’d you get her back?”

      He hushes his voice back down to the whisper scream: “I killed the bitch.”

      “You killed her?” The listener gasps.

      “Man, shhhhhh! Shut the fuck up, yo. I ain’t gonna tell you nothing you keep hollerin’ like that.”

      “How’d you do it?” the listener whispers back. I’m still eavesdropping from my office. I’m not concerned yet—these kinds of grandiose stories are not uncommon here. Some patients treat the unit as if it were prison, and the scarier they make themselves appear, the safer they feel, so bullshit stories about murders are rampant.

      “Ha. I’ll tell you how I did it. She had a house in the Bronx, right? And she would let her dog out the back to run around and piss and whatever. So one night, I went to her house, and I waited for her to let that dog out. Once I seen the dog, I jumped the fence and I grabbed him.”

      I hear chairs from the computer room scooting across the floor, followed by a few short footsteps. The story is getting more listeners.

      “He was some old shaggy piece of shit dog. I had a can of lighter fluid with me, and I dumped it all over that dog. He was so stupid, he started to lick it off. He liked it, too. Just kept lickin’ at that lighter fluid. But he stopped when I lit him up.”

      “No shit? You lit the fuckin’ dog on fire?”

      “Damn right, I did! And he starts barkin’ and yellin’ and shit, so I pick him up, and I throw his ass through the back window of the bitch’s house. It smashes the window, and the curtains got lit up, too. I could hear the dog, and it was screamin’ and then I heard Alisha, and she start screamin’, too. And she trying to put the dog out, and he dyin’ and the fire just getting bigger and bigger.” His voice is getting loud now, and I can feel my fists clenching.

      “So, she says ‘fuck the dog, I gotta get out,’ and she runs out the back door, and where am I? Right there waitin’ for her. And it’s dark out, and she don’t even see me, so she runs right into me. I grab her and turn her around so she has to watch the house burn. I put my hand over her mouth so she can’t scream. You see that?” I can almost hear the craning necks looking to see what the storyteller is showing them. “Bitch started biting my hand. But she stopped biting when I popped her in the mouth.

      “The house was going up fast, I mean fast, and it started to get hot and the smoke made it hard to see, so I pulled her back into the alleyway behind the house. She was kickin’ and pullin’ and she knew she couldn’t save nothin’, and so she stopped strugglin’ and just watched it burn. The fire was mad loud, and then when the trucks came, you couldn’t hear nothin’, not even screamin’. So I took my hand off her mouth, and I told her: this is what she gets for fuckin’ with me.”

      “And no one saw you? You didn’t get caught?”

      “Nah, man. Nobody even knew we was there. And she starts beggin’ and sobbin’ and slobberin’ all over, and that’s when I finished it. I just put my hand around her neck, and I squeezed. Didn’t even take that long.”

      I feel my face contort into an angry grimace as I hear this macho bullshit. I find myself overwhelmed with disappointment at the pathetically appreciative response from the listeners. This sociopathic story, this admiration from peers—I’ll never understand this shit. The more I keep hearing it over the years, the more I feel like it’s seeping into me, disturbing my sanity. I keep listening and I hear some of the guys relaying bits of the story to latecomers. I even hear what sound like high fives. And then I hear raspy, almost panicked breaths. I hear a familiar voice now, shaking, furious. Tyler.

      “You set a woman’s dog on fire? You threw her dog into her house and her house caught fire?” Tyler has obviously been listening, and he is appalled.

      “Yeah, bro, and what?”

      “And what? You murdered her? For cheating on you?” His