The Madman's Tale by John Katzenbach

were bent and broken, blackened by disuse and lack of care. He couldn’t imagine anyone using either.
    “What you looking at C-Bird?” Little Black asked.
    “The hospital,” Francis replied. “I just didn’t know how big it was.”
    “Many, too many, here now,” Little Black said quietly. “Every dormitory filled to bursting. Beds jammed up close together. People with nothing to do, just hanging in the hallways. Not enough games. Not enough therapy. Just everybody in here getting real close together. That ain’t good.”
    Francis looked over at the huge gate that he’d passed through on his first day at the hospital. It was wide open.
    “They lock it at night,” Little Black said, anticipating his question.
    “Mister Evans thought I was going to try to run away,” Francis said.
    Little Black shook his head and smiled. “People always think that’s what the folks here will do, but it don’t happen,” he said. “Even Mister Evil, he’s been here a couple of years, but he should know better.”
    “Why not?” Francis asked. “Why don’t people try to run away?”
    Little Black sighed. “You know the answer to that C-Bird. It ain’t about fences, and it ain’t about locked doors, although we got plenty of those. There’s lotsa ways to keep a person locked up. You think about it. But the best way of all doesn’t have anything to do with drugs or deadbolt locks, C-Bird. It’s that hardly anybody in here has some place to run to. With no place to go, nobody goes. It’s that simple.”
    With that, he turned away and tried to help Cleo with her seeds. She hadn’t dug the furrows deep enough or wide enough. She showed some frustrationon her face, until Little Black reminded her that servants spread flower petals in her path, when her namesake entered Rome. This made her pause, and then redouble her efforts, until Cleo was digging and scraping through the moldy, gravelly ground with a determination that seemed genuinely profound. Cleo was a large woman, who wore brightly colored smocks that billowed around her, concealing her extensive bulk. She wheezed often, smoked too much, and wore her dark hair in scraggly streams down around her shoulders. When she walked, she seemed to lurch back and forth, like a rudderless ship blown off course by high winds and choppy waves. But Francis knew she was transformed, when she took up a Ping-Pong paddle, shedding her unwieldy size almost magically, and becoming svelte, catlike, and quick.
    He looked back over at the gate, and then to his fellow patients and slowly began to grasp what Little Black had been saying. One of the older men was having trouble with his trowel; it was shaking hard in a palsied hand. Another had become distracted, and was staring up at a raucous crow perched in a nearby tree.
    Deep inside him, he heard one of his voices speak sullenly, repeating what Little Black had told him, as if to underscore each word:
No one runs, because no one has any place to run to. And neither do you, Francis
.
    Then a chorus of assent.
    For a moment, Francis spun about, his head pivoting wildly. For in that second, beneath the sunlight and the mild spring breezes, his hands already caked with dirt from the garden, he saw what could be his future. And it terrified him more than anything that had happened so far. He could see that his life was a slippery thin rope, and he needed to grasp hold of it. It was the worst feeling he had ever had. He knew he was mad, and knew, just as surely, that he couldn’t be. And, in that second, he realized, he had to find something that would keep him sane. Or make him appear to be sane.
    Francis breathed in hard. He did not think this would be easy.
    And, as if to underline the problem, within him his voices argued loudly, making a racket. He tried to quiet them, but this was difficult. It took a few moments for them all to reduce their volume so that he could make some sense out of what they were saying. Francis glanced over at the