Shutter Island

I haven’t stepped foot on it in more than two decades, but Emily says (sometimes joking, sometimes not) that she’s not sure I ever left. She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me, in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

In the years following those four strange days of late summer 1954, I took to studying the rats from a cut in the hill overlooking the northern shore. I was fascinated to discover that some of the rats would try to swim for Paddock Island, little more than a rock in a cupful of sand that remained submerged twenty-two hours out of every day. When it appeared for that hour or two as the current reached its lowest ebb, sometimes they’d swim for it, these rats, never more than a dozen or so and always driven back by the riptide.

I say always, but no. I saw one make it. Once. The night of the harvest moon in October ’56. I saw its black moccasin of a body dart across the sand.

Or so I think. Emily, whom I met on the island, will say, “Lester, you couldn’t have. It was too far away.”

“But do we lose our past to assure our future?” Chuck flicked his cigarette out into the foam. “That’s the question. What do you lose when you sweep a floor, Teddy? Dust. Crumbs that would otherwise draw ants. But what of the earring she misplaced? Is that in the trash now too?”

Teddy said, “Who’s ‘she’? Where did ‘she’ come from, Chuck?”

“There’s always a she. Isn’t there?”

Dolores had been dead for two years, but she came to life at night in his dreams, and he sometimes went full minutes into a new morning thinking she was out in the kitchen or taking her coffee on the front stoop of their apartment on Buttonwood. This was a cruel trick of the mind, yes, but Teddy had long ago accepted the logic of it—waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without a history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.

McPherson said, “In a less enlightened age, a patient like Gryce would have been put to death. But here they can study him, define a pathology, maybe isolate the abnormality in his brain that caused him to disengage so completely from acceptable patterns of behavior. If they can do that, maybe we can reach a day where that kind of disengagement can be rooted out of society entirely.”

“Ah,” Cawley said, “now we’re getting into the true horrible beauty of the full-blown schizophrenic’s paranoid structure. If you believe, gentlemen, that you are the sole holder of truth, then everyone else must be lying. And if everyone is lying...”

“Then any truth they say,” Chuck said, “must be a lie.”

Teddy laughed, heard the sound of it carry off on the sweep of night air and dissolve in the distant surf, as if it had never been, as if the island and the sea and the salt took what you thought you had and...

I held her. This world can’t give me that. This world can only give me reminders of what I don’t have, can never have, didn’t have for long enough.

“What would I do if I did get out?” Bridget said. “I don’t know what’s out in that world anymore. Bombs, I hear. Bombs that can turn whole cities to ash. And televisions. That’s what they call them, isn’t it? There’s a rumor each ward will get one, and we’ll be able to see plays on this box. I don’t know that I’d like that. Voices coming from a box. Faces from a box. I hear enough voices and see enough faces every day. I don’t need more noise.”

“Jesus, Dolores, you’ve got to get yourself together. You’ve got responsibilities. Think about those sometimes—okay?—and get your fucking head right.”

Those were the last words his wife heard from him. He’d closed the door and walked down the stairs, paused on the last step. He thought of going back. He thought of going back up the stairs and into the apartment and somehow making it right. Or, if not right, at least softer.

Softer. That would have been nice.

Laeddis was a grim specimen of humanity—a gnarled cord of a body, a gangly head with a jutting chin that was twice as long as it should have been, misshapen teeth, sprouts of blond hair on a scabby, pink skull—but Teddy was glad to see him. He was the only one he knew in the room.

“How much violence, Marshal, do you think a man can carry before it breaks him?”

“They knew. Don’t you get it? Everything you were up to. Your whole plan. This is a game. A handsomely mounted stage play. All this”—his arm swept the air above him—“is for you.”

George Noyce smiled through the stream of tears and shook his head very slowly. “You can’t kill Laeddis and expose the truth at the same time. You have to make a choice. You understand that, don’t you?”

“If you are deemed insane, then all actions that would otherwise prove you are not do, in actuality, fall into the framework of an insane person’s actions. Your sound protests constitute denial. Your valid fears are deemed paranoia. Your survival instincts are labeled defense mechanisms. It’s a no-win situation. It’s a death penalty really. Once you’re here, you’re not getting out. No one leaves Ward C. No one. Well, a few have, okay, I’ll grant you, a few have gotten out. But they’ve had surgery. In the brain.

“God loves violence. You understand that, don’t you?”

“No,” Teddy said, “I don’t.”

The warden walked a few steps forward and turned to face Teddy. “Why else would there be so much of it? It’s in us. It comes out of us. It is what we do more naturally than we breathe. We wage war. We burn sacrifices. We pillage and tear at the flesh of our brothers. We fill great fields with our stinking dead. And why? To show Him that we’ve learned from His example.”

“Why you all wet, baby?”

“This is it,” Cawley agreed. “This is the lighthouse. The Holy Grail. The great truth you’ve been seeking. Is it everything you hoped for and more?”

“I haven’t seen the basement.”

“There is no basement. It’s a lighthouse.”

“Your name is Andrew Laeddis,” Cawley said. “The sixty-seventh patient at Ashecliffe Hospital? He’s you, Andrew.”

“Your name is Andrew Laeddis. You did a terrible thing, and you can’t forgive yourself, no matter what, so you playact. You’ve created a dense, complex narrative structure in which you are the hero, Andrew. You convince yourself you’re still a U.S. marshal and you’re here on a case. And you’ve uncovered a conspiracy, which means that anything we tell you to the contrary plays into your fantasy that we’re conspiring against you. And maybe we could let that go, let you live in your fantasy world. I’d like that. If you were harmless, I’d like that a lot. But you’re violent, you’re very violent. And because of your military and law enforcement training, you’re too good at it. You’re the most dangerous patient we have here. We can’t contain you. It’s been decided—look at me.”

“You dream. You dream all the time. You can’t stop dreaming, Andrew. You’ve told me about them. Have you had any lately with the two boys and the little girl? Huh? Has the little girl taken you to your headstone? You’re ‘a bad sailor,’ Andrew. You know what that means? It means you’re a bad father. You didn’t navigate for them, Andrew. You didn’t save them. You want to talk about the logs? Huh? Come over here and look at them. Tell me they’re not the children from your dreams.”

“Maybe I’ve outgrown this place. Or it’s outgrown me. But someday, Marshal, and it’s not far off, we’ll medicate human experience right out of the human experience. Do you understand that?”

And he dreamed.

And in his dreams he and Dolores lived in a house by a lake.

Because they’d had to leave the city.

Because the city was mean and violent.

Because she’d lit their apartment on Buttonwood on fire.

Trying to rid it of ghosts.

He dreamed of their love as steel, impervious to fire or rain or the beating of hammers.

He dreamed that Dolores was insane.

Teddy left his children and sat on the gazebo floor for a long time, watching her sway, and the worst of it all was how much he loved her. If he could sacrifice his own mind to restore hers, he would. Sell his limbs? Fine. She had been all the love he’d ever known for so long. She had been what carried him through the war, through this awful world. He loved her more than his life, more than his soul.

But he’d failed her. Failed his children. Failed the lives they’d all built together because he’d refused to see Dolores, really see her, see that her insanity was not her fault, not something she could control, not some proof of moral weakness or lack of fortitude.

Teddy said, “I don’t know, Chuck. You think they’re onto us?”

“Nah.” Chuck tilted his head back, squinting a bit in the sun, and he smiled at Teddy. “We’re too smart for that.”

“Yeah,” Teddy said. “We are, aren’t we?”