The View from the Vue Read Online Free Page A

racing. I thought, My God, what happens if I ask this guy a wrong question and he gets pissed off at me? He’ll kill me and drink my blood and leave me lying here and they’ll never find me; they’ll think I’m just another catatonic patient.
    Finally I forced myself to be calm. I’m being silly, I thought. He won’t hurt me. And I won’t ask any wrong questions. I drew a couple of deep breaths and then noticed that all this time Mr. Jackson was staring at me with hostility in his eye and a sardonic little smile at the corners of his mouth.
    I knew I had to start talking, and I drew in another breath. No hesitancy now, Karp. Show him who’s boss.
    “Well, Mr. Jackson,” I said. “Why don’t you tell my why you’re here in the hospital?”
    Mr. Jackson ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair. Then he looked up slowly and glared into my eyes.
    “Well, Doc,” he drawled, in a subtly mocking tone, “it’s like this. The reason I’m here is that I think all the paranoids in the world are out to get me.”
    In the end, I managed to survive my interview with Mr. Jackson, but it took a bit of prodding by Dr. Rothstein to get me to see my second assigned patient. Fortunately, that encounter was considerably less traumatic, and after interviewing and examining a few more patients, I even managed to regain a part of my original confidence. One issue, though, continued to haunt me and make me uneasy: the claim by the patients that they had been railroaded to Bellevue. It seemed that every patient I interviewed, who was in any way capable of conversation, sooner or later informed me that he or she was at that moment talking to me only because an enemy had arranged for the patient to be involuntarily committed. The sole variation on the theme was in the nature of the enemy.
    By far the most frequent committer of the innocent was the F.B.I. It seemed, however, that the Feds persecuted only the most blatantly psychotic inmates, and it was pretty easy to disregard such a complaint when the patient followed it up by pointing his finger at an uninhabited corner to show me the G-man who was still tailing him day and night. Less clear-cut were the situations involving supposed commitments because of the complaint of a spouse or another relative. Sometimes the hospital records bore out the basic truth of the complaint, sometimes not. In either event, as a group, the patients making this claim did not seem as strange as the F.B.I. bunch, and I experienced a good bit of difficulty in trying to sort out justified anger from paranoia.
    What do you think when an enraged, but seemingly coherent man tells you that the cops dragged him off to The Vue because his wife claimed he had attacked her with a knife, but that in reality he had done no such thing. To make the situation thoroughly incomprehensible, a patient of this sort sometimes also said that his wife had been trying to get rid of him for some time, and that the first thing he was going to do upon his release was kill her. Such a guy was definitely more than a little dangerous, yes. But crazy? I could never tell. Every now and then, one of the less violently inclined “referrals” would eventually get out and promptly hire a lawyer in an attempt to squeeze a little monetary compensation out of the city.
    No such patient caused me more confusion—and embarrassment—than Solomon Washington. Mr. Washington was one of the patients assigned to me during my third-year clerkship. He had been admitted late the previous night, and when I sat down to interview him, had not yet run the gamut of the residents. He was still quite willing to talk to a doctor. In fact, he was eager.
    He was a huge black man, weighing well in excess of two hundred pounds, and stood six-four in his paper Bellevue slippers. His bearing was of extreme, perhaps excessive, dignity, which at times approached the Amos n’ Andy burlesque style. But despite the physical resemblance and the similarity of