Atticus by Ron Hansen

still.’”
    She hurriedly shifted from fourth to third and Atticus faced front as Renata’s foot hit the brake gently at first and then harder. An old green Chevrolet pickup truck whose hood and fenders flapped like shingles was turtling ahead with its huge haul of ten or more hotel workers going in for the four o’clock shift. “I hate this highway,” she said. “Kids are getting killed on it all the time. And the fatalists here simply put up more crosses.”
    She peered into her rearview mirror and Atticus craned his head around. “Okay, go,” he told her. She floored it and passed the truck before she shifted to fourth. She seemed lost in thought so he urged, her with, “Hearing voices that said, ’Sit here and be still.’ And then being hauled in to Hirsch.”
    â€œOh, thanks. I felt I was trapped inside a foreign body that frustrated all my attempts to operate it. I used to hear the psychiatrist asking me questions, but a half hour or more would pass before I would finally answer him and then he’d have gone off to another patient. Hospital interns used to peer at me with fascination as he lifted my arm upfrom my side and let me hold it there, still as a post, as he lectured. And then when he finished explaining my condition, he’d pull down my arm again. My eyes were as dull and blank and fake as a shark’s, and I was stiff and silent and seemingly not with it, but I heard and saw and perceived in ways I haven’t since I became normal.
    â€œAnd that’s how I was when I first met Scott. I forget the circumstances of why I was outside my room or why he was in the hall, but he was and I was, at three or four in the morning. I was just sitting in a fold-down chair by an iron-barred window. Catatonic. And Scott was talking to me like no one had in a while, as if we were on our first date. Hour after hour of fetchingly manic talk, no letting up; he’d finished the complete works of Shakespeare at Hirsch and thought old Will was pretty good. His favorite cereal as a kid was Cheerios, but now he liked wheat germ and yogurt; his favorite movie was King Kong , or maybe Singin’ in the Rain; his favorite novel was Beau Geste , he was sure of that, but nobody but Scott had read it, he said, they just thought they had. He told me his favorite person in the twentieth century was Albert Schweitzer—whom he said you resembled—and if he were about to be executed he’d order a Waldorf salad, medium rare prime rib, mashed potatoes, and apple cobbler.”
    â€œHis mother would fix him that for his birthdays.”
    â€œReally?” She flicked the Volkswagen’s blinker and waited for a high-balling tanker to blow past before she turned left. “Even today,” she said, “as insane as I was, I remember practically every word. He told me he was achronic manic depressive, but full of enough false beliefs and obsessions to fit the paranoid schizophrenic type, and for a time found himself hooked on Thorazine, so he knew what it was like to be inside a straitjacket.” She smiled and turned to Atticus. “And he was such a boy about competition. Scott told me he was the best patient there but the psychiatrists wouldn’t say so for fear of playing favorites.”
    Atticus ticked his head. “Yep, that’s him all right.”
    She said, “He further informed me that I’d be freed from the locked ward when I could fill out my food menu for the day, and I could get off the fifth floor when I finished my first pair of moccasins. And then it was sunrise and it was just glorious. We both stared at it for a minute, and he tried to entertain me by singing ‘Here Comes the Sun.’ Have you heard it, by the Beatles?”
    â€œI haven’t been feeble all my life.”
    She sang: ‘“Little darling, it’s been a long, cold, lonely winter. Little darling, it seems like years since it’s