The Cartoonist Read Free Page A

stood attentively around him in a tight horseshoe. They had already seen and briefly reviewed five patients, and Scott felt that was more than enough. Mrs. Stopa would be the last. He loosened his tie and set about this final task.
    “Mrs. Stopa is ninety-three,” Scott said, taking the hand of the stuporous old Pole seated on the commode in front of him. “She has garden-variety senility, or simple deterioration, as the textbooks call it.” The object of the afternoon’s exercise was to introduce the students to the wonders of aging, specifically, senescence. “As you can see, she’s totally vegged-out. Complete mental destitution.”
    In truth, Mrs. Stopa was a study in apathy. She stared vacantly into her lap. She drooled. Her jaws worked continuously, but only rude chomping noises came out. There was really little else Scott could say about the old gal, and when she suddenly broke wind, the group edged discreetly away.
    “Well, gang,” Scott said. “It’s Friday. Shall we call it a day—”
    “Hey, everyone, come look at this.”
    It was one of the students, an attractive young lady, calling to the group from across the hallway. She was staring excitedly over the shoulder of an elderly gentleman whose chest had been crisscrossed in canvas restraints to prevent him from toppling out of his wheelchair. At first glance, the old man appeared to have little more going for him than his ward-mate, Mrs. Stopa. His scrawny frame was clad in the accustomed attire of the senile—sleeveless undershirt, hospital-blue pajama bottoms, fuzzy brown slippers—and there was the familiar reek of ammonia about him. His face was sharp and heavily lined, and drool trailed from his chin to his food-spotted bib. His eyes, small and so deeply brown they appeared black, punctuated his barren expression like the button eyes of a rag doll.
    But as Scott drew closer, a light flickered in those eyes that hinted at something deeper. It was fleeting, gone so quickly it might not have even been there. But in the space of that single breath, Scott felt certain he’d seen something...lurking in those wrinkle-webbed eyes. What the old man was doing with his hands added to the feel of mystery. With his left he steadied a clipboard against his knees, and with the pencil in his right, he drew.
    Scott had heard about this old boy, but had not yet seen him in person. His attending physician, Vince Bateman, who was also chief of psychiatry, had presented the old man at Wednesday morning rounds as a ‘diagnostic dilemma.’ Clinically, the patient satisfied most of the criteria needed for a diagnosis of senility; and yet, according to Bateman, his artistic ability approached the incredible. He had arrived by ambulance, unconscious and with no ID, and Bateman had christened him ‘The Cartoonist.’
    “C’mere, you guys,” the student said. “Check this out. It’s amazing.
    The rest of the group gathered round, gawking curiously at the pad and the brisk, apparently haphazard path of the pencil. With an impatient glance at the time, Scott joined them.
    Unmindful of the intrusion, the old man continued his pencil scratching. As he drew, he rocked to the music coming from the radio on the wheelchair beside him. It was one of those old-fashioned transistor models that had been so popular some twenty years back, prior to the advent of the Walkman and the ghetto-blaster. Its cracked and battered casing was held together with strips of masking tape, grubby with age.
    Scott glanced at the old man’s pad...and when he did, his impatience vanished. As a kid Scott had been an avid comic book fan, all of them, everything from Sergeant Rock to Richie Rich. But he had never seen anything like this.
    The artist had created a series of action drawings, squared-off in classic comic book style, which depicted two men boxing. In the last of these, one man lay face-down on the mat. The other stood with his legs spread and his arms triumphantly upthrust. Lead-black