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When Bolivar opens his eyes two days later, he is calm and seems rational. He’s restrained in the bed and there is still one policeman outside in the hallway — just in case. The guard sits straight in a wooden chair to the left of the door. He checks the identification badges of everyone who enters, makes a note on his clipboard. This is Consuela’s fifth time in, and the guard barely looks at her.
“¿Qué día es éste? Por favor.” The new patient stares at Consuela. His voice is demanding, almost commanding. It’s a voice that is perhaps used to giving orders. His head is lifted and he’s trying to see what it is that’s keeping him down in the bed.
“Qué?”
“¿Qué día es éste? What day is it?”
“It is Sunday,” Consuela says.
“Sunday? What date?” He pulls at his wrist restraints, still checking.
“Sunday, the fourth day of April.”
“April? You mean August. Where am I?” He flexes against the ankle restraints.
“Sevilla.”
“How did I get here? What happened to me?”
“You were brought here —” She stops.What exactly can she tell him? She’s not sure.
“I was in Palos. It all went sideways. There were two girls. Are they all right? Everything went horribly wrong…” But his voice trails off as if he is slowly finding the answers to his own questions.
“I was in Palos. I remember broken glass. People shouting. The ships were in the harbour.” He stops. He looks at her with suchexpectant eyes. “And?” he says. “And?”
What did this man want? And what? What is he looking for? What was he expecting to hear? Consuela shrugs and looks at him hopefully, looking for help.
“Why am I tied to this bed? I’m perfectly fine. My ships, though. Have they … have they sailed?” He’s irritated. Yanks at the wrist ties.
“Ships?” She’s thinking she should probably not say any more. There ought to be doctors here. The psychologists at this asylum are some of the best in the world. In the institution’s lengthy history, they’d had people from all over Europe as patients — even a couple of kings and a few wayward princesses had called this place home for brief periods of time. It had been one of the first asylums in the world to actually attempt to help the mentally ill — to get at the root cause of an illness.When it first opened, so-called treatments in other parts of Europe were still muddled in the casting out of devils or burning people or drowning them as witches — remarkably final and fatal cures — while the Sevilla Institute was actually caring for the mentally ill. This place, this hospital of innocents, has been a relatively safe haven for many, many years.
“I’ll get a doctor,” Consuela says, turning.
“Wait.”
She stops.
“Get me a phone,” he snaps. “I want to make a call.”
“Pardon?”
“A phone damnit. Look, I am Columbus. Christopher Columbus. I know the queen, the queen and the king. They can vouch for me. I am to lead three ships across theWestern Sea. We’ve got a deal, damnit! Just get them on the phone.”
Whoa, she thinks. Consuela can hear the earnest certainty of his voice. He believes what he’s saying. “You want to fall off the edge of the Earth?” Consuela is performing her own little experiment. “You want to die?”
“You don’t believe that. Nobody but a simpleton would believe that old wives’ tale. Try not to underestimate my intelligence and I’ll do the same for you.”
“I’ll let Dr. Fuentes know you’re awake.”
“Yes, let your doctor know that I’m hungry, and I have to piss, and I’m not crazy.”
She shuts the door — the click echoes in the stone hallway. Consuela walks past the admitting desk and around the corner to Dr. Fuentes’s office. She knocks on his door. Waits. Knocks again.
The door squeaks open, slowly. “Yes. What is it?” He says this with the bearing of someone who has been doing something frustrating and this intrusion is the icing on the annoyance cake. Dr. Fuentes is a tall, clean-shaven man who is a fastidious bureaucrat. He’s just been appointed chief of staff at the institute. Consuela is honestly uncertain about his skills as a doctor.
He holds the door open with one hand and fumbles with his labcoat buttons with the other. The sound of a chair scraping on a tiled floor comes from inside the office.
“Patient 9214 is awake.” Consuela decides she does not want to know who else is in there. Damnit! She hates stuff like this — office politics. Knowing the human contents of Dr. Fuentes’s office would put her in the middle of something. There was no scraping sound, she tells herself. It was nothing. There was no scraping.
“Thank you.” The doctor releases the door but catches it immediately. “Wait. Is he still sedated?” She nods. Fair enough. There was no way to know for sure if this new patient was going to explode again or if he was done.
