The Thomas Berryman Number Read Online Free PDF

was reading
Shockproof Sydney Skate
by Marijane Meaker.
    I looked down at Asher.
The Beard.
There was something about the scraggly face growth that appealed to me.
    “I’ve been thinking about a beard.” I broke our mutual silence. “I don’t understand my motivation though.”
    “You want people to know how smart you really are,” the aide grinned. “Beard’s a pain-in-the-ass way to do it though. Always getting spaghetti and cake in mine.”
    “I don’t want people to think I’m smart.” I watched the dull ceiling lights pass over my head. “I don’t know exactly what it is. Not that, though.”
    We stopped at the patients’ kitchen and he went on about the physical hardships of a beard. It was the kind of conversation people have at wakes down South—you talk about anything but the wake and the wakee.
    Asher poured out some of the blackest coffee I’d ever seen. He had kind of an intriguing job, I was thinking.
    I was also watching a pimply teenager who was in the kitchen with us. The boy was shoveling tablespoons of sugar into a tall glass of milk. He had fuzzy, electric hair and looked burned out at sixteen.
    A fairly good (pragmatic) idea occurred to me in the kitchen. I began building up the nerve to ask Asher for an important favor.
    “How much do you know about all this?” I asked for starters.
    “The whole.” Asher sipped the black coffee. “Just about, anyway. Shulman took me to dinner tonight. He told me the
hospital
position. He said I’d be the only one to supervise visits between you and Ben.”
    I put cream and raw sugar in my coffee. All motions. I wasn’t going to drink the muddy geedunk. It reminded me of the Mississippi River.
    “So you’re pretty tight with Shulman?”
    “We agree. We disagree. He generalizes too much for my taste. Textbooks sometimes. Basically he trusts my instincts, though. Believe it or not, I was in Columbia before this.”
    “He told you about Jimmie Horn?” I said.
    “Yes, he told me. But I still wasn’t prepared for what I heard back there with Toy. Most of us hadn’t taken him all that seriously before.”
    I decided to ask Asher for a big favor. I was close to blurting it out anyway.
    I started by moronically sipping some coffee.
    “I don’t want to play on your emotions,” I said, “but I knew Horn for about eight years before this happened.
    “In a lot of ways we were friends. In
some
ways,” I corrected myself. “That doesn’t have anything to do with you … except that it gives you an idea of what’s going on in my head right now. My mind is a fucking wreck.”
    The aide nodded. Once again, the coffee.
    “OK,” I sighed. “
The problem …
I’d like to read what’s been written about Toy since he’s been in here … I could ask Alan Shulman. But I’m afraid to. If Shulman turns me down, I’m fucked. I’m looking for names, dates, anything about Thomas Berryman. I swear to you that I won’t use anything that would hurt anybody else in here. On Bowditch.”
    Asher nodded again. He really looked exhausted and I felt sorry for him. His eyes shifted out the kitchen window into the dark exercise yard.
    Beyond the floodlights on the wall was a staff parking lot. Then the end of the hospital grounds. Then the ocean. At night you could only see the wall, though. Salvador Dali couldn’t have done it better.
    “When you turn left outside the front door, the inside door,” Asher turned to me, “there’s a small conference room. Wait in there. I’ll try to get you what you need.”
    The aide brought me Ben Toy’s admission notes, workup notes, daily nursing charts—over two hundred pages in all.
    Everything was stamped CONFIDENTIAL or NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM THIS ROOM . Some of it was typed, but most of the notes were handwritten in black ink.
    I started to copy names, addresses, telephone numbers …
    Jimmie Horn was mentioned several times in the daily notes; Harley Wynn was mentioned; Thomas Berryman didn’t come up that