Crack-Up Read Free

storied Boston team.   “With the Orioles in the cellar, it shouldn’t be hard to get tickets.”
    “Works for me.   You pick a date, and buy the tickets.”
    “Day game, or night?”
    “Night,” I said.   It would be late June by then, and I was thinking about the heat.
    “Okay, buddy.”
    I waved and headed inside.   In the five years since I’d moved to the neighborhood, Stuart Carr had gradually become my closest friend.   But it never crossed my mind to share with even him what had happened to me on that plane.
    In the center hallway on the ground floor of our townhouse, I passed by the new maid—what’s her name—as she dusted picture frames.   She was white, this one, and weathered, with rheumy eyes telling of too many bad decisions.   She flashed me a smile, her teeth stained and crooked, avoiding each other, like a family that doesn’t get along while posing for a group portrait.
    In the kitchen, I slugged down a tall glass of water while peering through the window over the sink.   Ellie was running with Duke around our little, fenced-in back lawn, playing keep-away with a squeaky toy.   Sarah sat on the edge of the open porch, lost in her prenatal yoga.   Along with her old drawstring yoga pants, she wore a pink cut-off Tee shirt, her swollen, second trimester belly exposed and celebrated with hand-painted swirls of vivid color I recognized as Ellie’s art.   Nearby, our Japanese gardener was sculpting a shrub.
    Now his name I knew.   Hideo Mori.   He’d been doing our yard for years.   He rarely spoke to me, and when he did, I rarely understood his meaning.   Sarah, on the other hand, seemed to know all about him.   Thought him profound.   Said he had an old soul. (Hard to check her story though.   She has a knack that way.)
    Something in my chest squeezed as I looked at my ladies unobserved.   I took the stairs up to the master bedroom.
    In the bathroom, I opened the mirrored cupboard above the sink and grabbed a bottle of pills sitting on the top shelf.   I spilled the entire contents onto the countertop.   Then I began counting . . . So many little white pills . . . If I were John Helms , I thought, I wouldn’t have to do this pill counting .   John had a high-tech medicine cupboard I’d seen once when redesigning the security system for his estate.   Every time he opened it up, a recorded voice would play through a small speaker to remind him if he needed to take a pill.   Somehow, his computer-assisted cupboard even knew whether he did what he was told.
    My count, as I recall, ended at fifty-three pills.   I checked the pill bottle for the date of purchase and the number of pills it had originally contained.   Then I did the math . . .
    No, I hadn’t been forgetting.   Hadn’t skipped a single day.   In fact, I was a pill short—as if I’d taken two pills one day by accident.   Probably a math error.   The important thing was I’d been taking my medication.   Just as I’d thought.   The first thing I would do in the morning was pee and then I’d take my Risperdal.
    You’re probably wondering by now, if you’re having trouble recalling the news accounts from last year, during the peak of my infamy, “Just what exactly, Mister Ward, is wrong with you?”
    Clinically speaking, I’m a paranoid schizophrenic.   I’m not, however, a typical case.   I count myself very lucky to be what Doctor Shields—that’s my psychiatrist—calls a high-functioning paranoid schizophrenic.   But enough about my disease for now as I’m sure you must be wondering how I ever managed to sneak myself into the security business in the first place.   I’ll tell you this much.   Until recently, I was able—with some luck and some cunning—to hide my disease from all public knowledge.
    Why I ever chose to become a security consultant—and before that, a United States Secret Service agent—I never considered seriously until Doctor Shields insisted.
    Excitement,