The Crazy School Read Online Free PDF

“I like history.”
    “Me too. I think about the same kind of stuff you do, a lot.
    Sometimes even . . .” He stopped, embarrassed.
    “Sometimes even what?” I asked.
    “Well, sometimes too much.”
    We listened to the construction guys banging together a frame so they could pour Santangelo’s helipad concrete.
    I pulled my end of the map off the holder. “How do you mean?”
    “It’s a schizophrenia thing—all these weird connections.
    Like, well, tell me a random word. Anything.”
    “Um . . . Germany.”
    He considered that for a second.
    “Okay, so before,” he said, “I would have thought right away 2 9
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    you meant all this deep stuff. Layers and layers, like you said.
    My family is German. We’re Jewish. They all tried to come over here, but not everyone made it. I would’ve thought you were warning me about the Nazis coming back.”
    “Sure,” I said.
    “Before, though, it was always way beyond worry for me. I could hear something on the radio, some song when I got in a taxi—it would seem important . Like code. Messages.”
    “Before here?”
    He nodded.
    “So, Sitzman, stuff like that, does this place help?” I asked.
    “My fi rst month here, I ran away. I spent three days sneaking around the woods in my pajamas with no food. All I’d brought with me was my electric razor.”
    “To shave?”
    He shook his head. “To keep in radio contact with the FBI.”
    “No shit.”
    “None. And it rained the whole damn time. I’m just lucky it wasn’t snowing. I probably would’ve died.”
    I turned to look at him. “Dude, I’m really glad you’re all right.”
    “I appreciate that.”
    “Do you like it here?”
    “I miss fl ying,” he said. “My dad used to take me up in his plane. Twin turboprop—Beech Super King Air 200. I almost had my license.”
    He toyed with the roller mechanism, then pulled the map down slowly, to see if it would roll back up.
    First time didn’t work. Second time he made it zip home-ward like a champ.
    “Sitzman, you rock,” I said.
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    He blushed a little. “Can I ask you a question?”
    “Fire away,” I said, crossing my fi ngers that it wouldn’t be whether I liked younger guys or what have you.
    “Did you ever work in a hospital? Like Lake Haven?”
    A lot of kids here came from Lake Haven. The equivalent of a feeder school. I shook my head and climbed down off the chair.
    Sitzman followed. “It’s just that when I mentioned the razor and everything, you didn’t seem surprised.”
    I dragged my chair back in place and leaned against it.
    “Most people would be,” he said, perching on the edge of my desk, “even here.”
    “It sounded like my dad.”
    “No shit.”
    “Well, except he’s more into the KGB.”
    “Oh, sure,” Sitzman said. “Lot of that going around.”
    That made me smile. “He was in the Marine Corps. A John Bircher and everything. No warnings from the radio, though.
    Or at least he hasn’t talked about it.”
    “He’s probably just a delusional paranoid, then. With full-blown schizophrenia, you’re all about the messages.”
    “Dad does occasionally get into sending me Wall Street Journal clippings.”
    With circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, explaining what each one was, to be used as evidence against us.
    “Such as?”
    “Oh, like he decided the Vatican Bank had assassinated John Paul I to cover up how the amount of money they ‘couldn’t locate’ exactly matched the miraculously repaid national debt of Argentina or Venezuela or wherever.”
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    Sitzman crossed his arms. “Sounds like they could get his meds dialed in a little better.”
    “Dad is not a meds kind of guy. Except for smoking dope.”
    “What is he, nuts?”
    I sighed.
    “Joke,” he said. “But I mean, that’s what this place did for me—got the dosage right.