“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He can’t talk to you. He can’t help you.”
“Mr. Tilfer?”
“I really need to get back to work.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s your last delivery today.”
“How do you know that?”
Let him dangle, she thought. “Let’s stop wasting time with the cryptic ‘he’s unavailable’ or can’t talk or whatever. It is hugely important I talk to him.”
“About his graduating class at Princeton?”
“There’s more to it. Someone is harming his old roommates.”
“And you think it’s Kelvin?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“It can’t be him.”
“You can help me prove that. Either way, lives are being ruined. Your brother may even be in danger.”
“He’s not.”
“Then maybe he can help some old friends.”
“Kelvin? He’s in no position to help anyone.”
Again with the cryptic. It was starting to piss her off. “You talk like he’s dead.”
“He may as well be.”
“I don’t want to sound melodramatic, Mr. Tilfer, but this really is about life and death. If you don’t want to talk to me, I can bring the police in on it. I’m here alone but I can come back with a big news crew—cameras, sound, the works.”
Ronald Tilfer let loose a deep sigh. Her threat was an empty one, of course, but he didn’t have to know that. He gnawed on his lower lip. “You won’t take my word he can’t help you?”
“Sorry.”
He shrugged. “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“I’ll take you to see Kelvin.”
WENDY LOOKED at Kelvin Tilfer through the thick, protective glass.
“How long has he been here?”
“This time?” Ronald Tilfer shrugged. “Maybe three weeks. They’ll probably let him back out in a week.”
“And then where does he go?”
“He lives on the street until he does something dangerous again. Then they bring him back in. The state doesn’t believe in long-term mental hospitals anymore. So they release him.”
Kelvin Tilfer was writing furiously in a notebook, his nose just inches from the page. Wendy could hear him shouting through the glass. Nothing that made sense. Kelvin looked a lot older than his classmates. His hair and beard were gray. Teeth were missing.
“He was the smart brother,” Ronald said. “A freaking genius, especially in math. That’s what that book is filled with. Math problems. He writes them all day. He could never turn his mind off. Our mom worked so hard to make him normal, you know? The school wanted him to skip grades. She wouldn’t let him. She made him play sports—tried everything to keep him normal. But it was like we always knew he was heading in this direction. She tried to hold the crazy back. But it was like holding back an ocean with your bare hands.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s a raging schizophrenic. He has terrible psychotic episodes.”
“But, I mean, what happened to him?”
“What do you mean, what happened? He’s ill. There is no why.” There is no why—the second time someone had said that to her today. “How does someone get cancer? It wasn’t like Mommy beat him and he became like this. It’s a chemical imbalance. Like I said, it was always there. Even as a kid, he never slept. He couldn’t turn off his brain.”
Wendy remembered what Phil had said. Weird. Math-genius weird. “Do meds help?”
“They quiet him, sure. The same way a tranquilizer gun quiets an elephant. He still doesn’t know where he is or who he is. When he graduated from Princeton he got a job with a pharmaceutical company but he kept disappearing. They fired him. He took to the streets. For eight years we didn’t know where he was. When we finally found him in a cardboard box filled with his own feces, Kelvin had broken bones that hadn’t healed properly. He’d lost teeth. I can’t even imagine how he survived, how he found food, what he must have gone through.”
Kelvin started screaming again: “Himmler! Himmler likes tuna steaks!”
She turned to Ronald. “Himmler? The old Nazi?”
“You got me. He never makes any sense.”
Kelvin went back to his notebook, writing even faster now.
“Can I talk to him?” she asked.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No.”
“It won’t help.”
“And it won’t hurt.”
Ronald Tilfer looked through the window. “Most times, he doesn’t know who I am anymore. He looks right through me. I wanted to bring him home, but I have a wife, a kid. . . .”
Wendy said nothing.
“I should do something to protect him, don’t you think? I try to lock him up, he gets angry. So I let him go and worry about him. We’d go to Yankee games when we were kids. Kelvin knew every player’s statistics. He could even tell you how they changed after an at-bat. My theory: Genius is a curse. That’s how I look at it. Some think that the brilliant comprehend the universe in a way the rest of us can’t. They see the world how it truly is—and that reality is so horrible they lose their minds. Clarity leads to insanity.”
Wendy just stared straight ahead. “Did Kelvin ever talk about Princeton?”
“My mom was so proud of him. I mean, we all were. Kids from our neighborhood didn’t go to Ivy League schools. We were worried he wouldn’t fit in, but he made friends fast.”
“Those friends are in trouble.”
“Look at him, Ms. Tynes. You think he can help them?”
“I’d like to take a shot at it.”
He shrugged. The hospital administrator made her sign some releases and suggested they keep their distance from him. A few minutes later they brought Wendy and Ronald into a glass-enclosed room. An orderly stood by the door. Kelvin sat at a desk and continued scribbling into his notebook. The table was wide, so that Wendy and Ronald were at a pretty good distance.
“Hey, Kelvin,” Ronald said.
“Drones don’t understand the essence.”
Ronald looked at Wendy. He gestured for her to go ahead.
“You went to Princeton, didn’t you, Kelvin?”
“I told you. Himmler likes tuna steaks.”
He still had his eyes on his notebooks. “Kelvin?”